Live in Provo!

For the third consecutive year the Division of Planetary Sciences meeting, our professional society, held and Open Mic Night. And for the third consecutive year I performed. I opened the first two shows, this time I was the last act before the finale. I used my smartphone to record my set, and after very light editing I'm including three of the songs below.  Enjoy! :)

When Doves Cry
One Week In Provo
The Waiting 

Hashtag Leave Me Alone

I've had very little time to pick my guitar lately, which is too bad. However, I'm starting to think it may be time to start recording again.

In that spirit, here's a very recent one of mine for you. It's still a work in progress.  It may be way too lyrically gimmicky to be any good, but at least it's fun. :)

Hashtag Leave Me Alone

When U Were Mine

A year ago today, Prince passed away.  It was the middle of National Poetry Writing Month, and while I marked his passing on Twitter by pointing to a Prince song I recorded in 2011, I didn't do anything here.

This year I seem to be posting poems to Twitter (at least for now), and I figured I should give him a tiny amount of his due here. So, I pounded out this Prince-penned classic, which was probably better known as a Cyndi Lauper song until it appeared on Prince's Hits album set.

RIP.

When U Were Mine

Inevitable Album Support Unplugged Set

Hello, everyone.

In lieu of going on a proper tour, the Gedankenband decided to put out a quick acoustic set of songs from the new album This Is My Circus, These Are My Monkeys, and then they left me to actually record it.  Thanks, gang.  It's live and ambient (so to speak), and includes the songs Say You Don't Mind, Replacement Song, and Knight In Faded Denim.  It's about as polished as you'd expect. The album is available for $4 on the Gedankenband Bandcamp site, though I have free download codes available for the needy.  Other work by the Gedankenband remains available to download from the same site at a "name your own price".  And all of our music is available for streaming on Spotify, etc.

Enjoy, and Happy Thanksgiving!









Link to Three-Song Set

Leonard Cohen takes Manhattan

It's a tumultuous time. I've mostly been off of social media since the election, but obviously heard of the passing of Leonard Cohen. I only know his work through the cover versions of others, and I'll add my name to that list. Rather than his most iconic song I'll post a version of (maybe) a lesser-known one, using REM's arrangement and done solo and live.  I recorded it in 2012 but this is the first time I've released it anywhere (for good reason, perhaps).

First We Take Manhattan

Hopeful Romantics

I haven't posted here in a little while, and This Is My Circus isn't really any closer than last time.  But I have been able to pick up my guitar just a little bit and I figured I should do some "advance publicity" for myself and my Gedankenbandmates.

So, here's "Hopeful Romantics" solo to one track. A version of this song will appear on the album, but I don't think any versions have appeared anywhere thus far. I'm afraid the title may have been originally inspired by a Barry Manilow quote, but inspiration is what it is.

Hopeful Romantics (solo)

Happy Chanukah 5775

The holiday season is upon us and Chanukah starts tonight, so I figured I'd record something seasonally appropriate for you-- a live one-take recording of the Gedankenband's Holiday single, both A and B sides. Admittedly, since the B-side was already a one-take thing you may not notice too much of a difference.

May your latkes be crisp, your gelt be tasty, and your dreidel always come up on gimel (whether or not you're #TeamAppleSauce or #TeamSourCream.

Judah and the Maccabees (live, acoustic)
Sevivon (live, acoustic)

Still available are the Gedankenband versions!

Going Back To Tucson

I'm heading to Tucson next week for the Division of Planetary Sciences Meeting. Since I spent a big chunk of my 20s in Tucson between grad school and a postdoc job, I am naturally feeling a bit sentimental.

I wrote a lot of music during my time in Tucson, played in several bands, recorded The Red Album there as well as stuff on the ol' 4-track. The city even worked its way into the lyrics of at least one song.  So I thought I'd dash something off here to mark the upcoming trip.

While "Going Back to Tucson" would have been a great choice, I couldn't find any chords. I seriously considered "Sweetheart" by Caitlin and the Stickponies. But in the end I figured I'd record one by The Sidewinders (aka The Sand Rubies).

So here's another one-take acoustic guitar and voice wonder for all my Old Pueblo pals:
Came On Like The Sun

 

Happy Halloween!

Non-bloggy stuff has been taking up a ton of time, but that doesn't mean I can't post something for Halloween. Jen is a big fan of the holiday, and we've spent much of the last few days listening to Halloween music. Today it's been a streaming Halloween station, which has mostly been the equivalent of using "Monster Mash" as the starting condition for a Pandora station. 

I started thinking I could do better.

Then I realized I have done better!  At least from my own, slanted point of view.

So here for your spooky enjoyment is a Gedankenband Deep Track from The Cheese Stands Alone:

My Vampire Love
"Bonus" (of sorts): My Vampire Love (demo)

Enjoy!  Or don't, you know.  Free country and all. 

Watching Rainbows turns 30

Today is the 30th anniversary of one of my first songs. I wrote "Watching Rainbows" for my first girlfriend, with whom I had a typical angsty teenage thing. We got together near the very end of 9th grade, she went off to Catholic school in Jersey City to start 10th grade. So, there were lots of letters etc. After we broke up we stayed friends, and we even went to my senior prom together.  So, all good.

At various times I've looked back and said "X was my first real song".  This is in the running for that-- I didn't know how to play any instruments but drums at the time*, but the lyrics are decent enough I think.  Since other (more famous) people have semi-famously recorded songs written when they were a similar age, I figured I'd have a bash.  I could record this in a Gedankenband version at some point, though it's not obvious to me what that would sound like. I do have a few songs that are even older, but to zeroth order this is as ancient as it gets.

With no further ado:

Watching Rainbows (solo acoustic, 2014)




*Indeed, I wasn't proficient enough at guitar to even figure this out for a few years. This uses the set of chords I retrofitted for the song in 1989. I don't know that it's what I would have come up with at the time (or at a different time), but it is what it is. I suppose I'm also celebrating the arrangement turning 25. :)

The Gedankenband on Spotify and the iTunes Store!

Technology marches on. The first music I distributed was via cassette. For the Red Album, In-Jokes, and Do Not Tip I made CDs for interested (and some uninterested) friends. Since then I've been posting mp3s for people to fetch.  But music distribution technology has continued to evolve, so I've been trying to keep up.

So I signed up with a distribution service, and am happy to announce that the first music I've submitted, the Local Technique and Not for Having, but for Tasting EPs can now be found on Spotify and the iTunes store!

They also remain available at the Bandcamp site.  I plan to submit more of the back catalog (and future releases) via these venues, too.

Thanks for your continued support and interest, or at least your benign disinterest. :)

Local Technique:
Bandcamp link  
Spotify link
iTunes link


Not for Having, but for Tasting:
Bandcamp link 
Spotify link 
iTunes link

Lo-fi mini-concert. Or something.

I picked up my guitar for the first time in a while intending to try some songwriting but I seem to have recorded some songs for the blog instead.  Your gain?  Whatever it is, they're recorded live with Audacity and with the gain set a bit too high, so the guitar is kind of distorted. However, since I haven't picked up my guitar in a while (see the first part) I need to get my calluses back in shape and I figured I'd live with the results. And now, so will you.

1. Middle of May (Gedankenband version on the Local Technique EP found here)
2. Take It On The Run (REO Speedwagon cover, because why not?)
3. Down from the Skies (Gedankenband version on the Do Not Tip or Rock album found here)

Dr. Lüst at the 1991 East Campus Picnic

I've mentioned Dr. Lüst and the Chiefs of the European Space Agency several times here on the blog. It was the first real band I was in and I wrote a whole bunch of songs for/while in the band, including Solitaire, Insecure, Gonna Be Around, and Hubris (among many others).  The other members of Dr. Lüst also wrote songs for the band, especially Dan Schmidt, and he's continued to play some of those songs in his successor bands (as I have with mine).

We also played a ton of covers, of course, and that's what I'll be posting today. Four of the five band members lived at or were alumni of the East Campus dorm at MIT, and that was where we would practice, but we only played the East Campus Spring Picnic once--my senior year of 1991. This would be our penultimate live performance, the final one coming at Bexley's Beast Roast a week or two later (not counting the inevitable reunion performance at a party in 1992).

I'm posting here five cover songs from that performance. We were pretty loose (to the point of sloppy) with some (all?) of these, but they're reasonably representative. Since I'm not sure how Dan, John, or Doug would feel about my posting their songs here I'm just going to stick to songs that I sang (along with one of Pat's):

1. When The Girls Get Here Pat sings this Young Fresh Fellows classic, in part because everyone else wanted to sing it and Pat was the only real compromise candidate.
2. Different Strokes I don't know what came over us but somehow we hit upon doing this song, which became a staple of our performances. We followed it up with The Facts Of Life at Bexley.
3. Head Over Heels Man, I loved this song. I took it with me to Jury Rig and Science Diet, though only Dr. Lüst had the keyboard part going.
4. Super Freak/U Can't Solve This A different version of this song appears early on in the blog's history. We'd been playing this one for years, and it shows as we wander through it injecting in-jokes and interrupting each other a bunch.  I love playing this song.
5. Free Bird You can hear the crowd yelling for Free Bird through most of this set, as they did through many of our sets (as was the style back then), we learned the song in response and as a way to punish the crowd. The audio tape ran out most of the way through our performance, so you don't get to hear the response from the crowd once we finished:  "Free Bird!"

After The Judgment Day

It feels like I haven't picked up my guitar in ages, so I thought I'd indulge myself a bit today after a crazy stretch. The most proximal crazy was moving everything out of the house in Pomona NY where I lived when I was in high school, in preparation for selling it (hopefully the closing will be this week). I've been using Twitter to chronicle the various bits and pieces of my childhood that I ran across. These two elements come together in today's post, sort of, as I wanted to record something relevant to the house.

In retrospect I was always writing lyrics, which segued into writing songs. I have a few different candidates for my first "real" song depending on definition. Some of them were written in the house previous to the Pomona house. Love at First Sight was written there, but there's already a Gedankenband version of the song. Kumiko was also written while living there, but with somewhat different lyrics.   Watching Rainbows is a personal favorite, but I'm saving it for a landmark anniversary this fall. So I turned to After The Judgment Day.

The song was written at the behest of a very-short lived band I was in. I'm not sure we ever even played together for more than an hour or two of practice. The name came from Jon the lead singer, who took the first initials of our names (Tracey the keyboardist, Darren the bass player, Jon, and me) and came up with the phrase. It was the first "band song" I wrote but not the last, with songs for Dr. Lüst, Jury Rig, and even the Gedankenband getting songs (Out Of Our League was written as a Science Diet equivalent but doesn't mention the band).

The lyrics for ATJD are a bit awkward, but were earnest. :)  I wrote it in March 1986, so it just turned 28. Recorded, as is often the case, solo with my guitar using Audacity. I hope you enjoy it!

After the Judgment Day

A questionable tribute to Lou Reed

It's been a busy month but I hope to get back to some music in a (slightly) slower patch between now and late January. However, I would be remiss not to commemorate Lou Reed's passing somehow. I admit to only a passing knowledge of his music outside of the "hits", though he touched the lives of many of the musicians I hold in esteem. REM's Dead Letter Office, which I bought in '87 when it came out, featured 3 Velvet Underground songs, serving as my gateway, and the band did other VU songs at concerts I attended.

And my college band, Dr. Lüst and the Chiefs of the European Space Agency, did a VU song as a major part of our sets early on: White Light/White Heat was how we'd end our sets, with Doug the instigator and singer. He was a big David Bowie fan, and our version was based on Bowie's (inasmuch as it was based on anything). I just liked the "flip out on G7" at the end. After a year or so it dropped out of the sets as our repertoire evolved (or something).  I include below a version we did one night at WMBR when our friend got us access to the studios for some recording in 1990. We'd tacked it on to a band intro song called "Dr. Lüst on Safari", which I excised and from which faded in.  For the curious, I'm on drums in this band.

For the second song I decided I'd just record Sweet Jane, my favorite of Reed's, cliched choice or not. On Twitter I called it an "indestructible song" and there's no better way to test that than have me play it...

Once again:

White Light/White Heat (Dr. Lüst)
Sweet Jane (solo acoustic!)

One that didn't get away

I've definitely got a thing for pop songs by female singers.  Over the years I sang Over the Rainbow, She Bop, and It's My Party for bands I was in, and advocated unsuccessfully for Piece of My Heart. Since Science Diet has two female members they've been singing lead on songs by women (like Heartbreaker and that band's version of She Bop), but here on the blog I've kept up by covering Ke$ha and Blondie, and there's a version of Bad Romance I sent to some friends.

So in that spirit, here's The One That Got Away, originally by Katy Perry, banged out live in glorious unmixed mono for a wet Sunday.

The One That Got Away (solo, acoustic)

While I'm at it, I'll continue to plug the MarcoPolo single, latest release from the Gedankenband! I'd cleverly failed to allow downloads when I first posted it, but that should now be fixed.

Oldie and Oldier

But Of Course
Congress St. Blues

In the rush of everything, I seem to have let a couple of song anniversaries slip past me. A few years ago I commemorated the 20th anniversary of Wrong Place Wrong Time with a post here and some old and new versions of it. Today I'll just put on some new recordings I banged out for fun.  This will likely be the last post before National Poetry Writing Month and the annual conversion into a poetry blog, so be warned!

The first song I'll mention is Congress St. Blues, written back in February of 1993. It name checks various Tucson place names (and the never-quite-finalized lyrics sometimes mention The Chicago Store), and was born after an evening gig with Pez Con Pelo at a bar on Congress Street (but not the Club Congress, the First Avenue Entry of Tucson).  I never recorded it for anything but a friend's mixtape, as it never seemed to rise above other songs from that time period. So after 20 years, here's its moment in the sun (so to speak).

The second one is older still.  But Of Course turned 25 years old this month, which is frankly astonishing to me since I don't feel much older than that myself. It was one of the last songs I wrote on my old keyboard (which I never learned to actually play) before starting to write songs on the 41st West guitar (which I arguably never learned to play). I've recorded older songs "for real" (Some Of The Time is from a few weeks earlier, for instance), but I always had a soft spot for this one (as did my girlfriend at the time).  So it certainly merits a rerecording after this one!

A Lost Original and Should've-been-lost Cover

Songs:
Bisbee Blue (demo)
Your Love (cover)

How about another song or two?  That's rhetorical: you don't have any real choice in the matter, though neither are you required to download or listen. But, of course, you know that already.

I just did a little bit of recording to pick up my mood a bit. The first song is an original called Bisbee Blue. I'm not quite sure when I wrote it, other than "mid-90s". The song is named for the town of Bisbee, once one of the largest cities in Arizona but most recently something of a tourist/artist/old-timey attraction. Bisbee blue is a...you know, I'm not sure what it is.  A color, of course, but I'm not sure if it was in local pottery or jewelry or what.   It's the local turquoise.  It's also the name of a song by Tucson band Calexico, though my song was written first. I'd forgotten about it for ages, and only rediscovered it a year or so ago. I may rerecord it for real for the next EP, but I figured I'd bang it out now and post it.

And since heaven forfend I just post one song, I added a goofy cover of Your Love by the Outfield. Their version is better, of course, but they had the advantage of knowing what they were doing. Even though I either botched the ending or didn't botch it because you can't botch what you don't know, I thought I'd post it, too. 

Both songs are just me and my guitar. For Bisbee Blue I recorded them on separate tracks in serial, for Your Love I just did it live (obviously). 

Dear Kate Bush

Songs at the bottom!

First a bit of near/medium term planning: Thanks to all for the positive response to the "We Didn't Start The Science" video! This post doesn't have any geeky rewritten pop songs, so be warned. :)  I plan to do National Poetry Writing Month again on the blog in April, and also to get a few music posts in before then. In particular, I'm hoping to post the first part of my Ceres rock opera (which is technically not an opera, I think). I've also been toying with a longer-term project of writing Schoolhouse Rock-style planetary science songs. The initial reaction has been positive, but of course that's entirely been from friends on Twitter. :)

OK, today I'm posting two versions of a song that I've been working on for a while but will clearly never put on a "proper" EP or LP like the ones on Bandcamp. I'm not sure exactly what started me writing a song "about" Kate Bush, but I started nonetheless. I wanted it to be a complicated, way-overproduced thing vaguely reminiscent of "Hounds of Love" (in fact, it was a cover of Hounds of Love that helped spur me on).  But I never could sing it worth a damn. I posted an instrumental version of it here (in fact it was one of my very first posts) and thought I'd figure it out later.

And so I did! I realized I should have Meredith sing it and that would work better.  Unfortunately, all of the techno wizardry needed for the various parts (including the 100% auto-tune that I think helps lend...something to the song) mean that the vocals sound odd in an unintended way.  On top of that, the sample of "The Man With The Child In His Eyes" means that I'm reluctant to put it on Bandcamp.  So I'm putting it here (and below) instead.

The second version is just me and my guitar.  I originally recorded it for a friend, and for completeness am putting it up here (and below). It's much much simpler than the way I imagine it (which is more like the "regular" version), so I don't want to put that on Bandcamp either.  And if it's not going to be on a proper release, I might as well put it here. :)

Dear Kate Bush: Meredith vocals, full Gedankenband
Dear Kate Bush: Andy and guitar

Video: We Didn't Start The Science

I do a lot on Twitter.  I'm probably use it more than any other social media site.  My handle is @ asrivkin, though you're much more likely to find this blog via Twitter than find me on Twitter via this blog. 

Anyhow, as I was approaching my 10,000th tweet I thought I'd do something fun. My 5,000th tweet found me at a famous landmark, but timing wasn't working out to do something similar for 10,000. So instead you get a video!  I did the "special effects" with Photo Booth-- it would likely have come out better if I'd allocated more time to the process and some effort into getting some better lighting, but perhaps it fits the DIY nature of things better this way.




"We Didn't Start The Science" appears a few times on this blog and elsewhere.  I of course didn't write the music. Because it's a cover it's not eligible to be on my Bandcamp site, but that doesn't mean I won't point to it and recent releases there anyway. :)