Soundcloud Site, and What I've Been Putting There

I have given in to the inevitable, and established a Soundcloud site for the music I've been putting here. I don't anticipate it will lead to any change in posting frequency (or infrequency) here--I had originally hosted the files themselves at MIT, then on a Google Drive site, now they'll be on Soundcloud (or at least the new ones will).

I've got five tracks posted right now, one of which has already appeared here as the Inevitable Found Wanting Support Live Set. The others currently posted as May takes over from April are:

Canon Romance: This one also sort-of appeared here, in solo acoustic form not long after it was written. Here it's been fleshed out with the rest of the Gedankenband, including a little intro. I was fighting a cold so it's somewhat more nasal than it might be, I'll certainly revisit the vocals before it gets an official release.

Let's Go Out (While We Stay In): I've moved my NaPoWriMo output to Twitter, but some of what I've written has ended up here, anyhow. I had a day when I set out to write song lyrics, and the relative novelty of the coronavirus response led me to write this relatively light-hearted song. I'm likely to pursue it for the next album, if I can get a Gedankenband arrangement that works.

Bought and Sold: Another NaPoWriMo product, though I'd written the first verse last summer. I'm pretty happy with this one, I don't tend to write a lot of lyrics like this, though I do write poetry like it a lot, I think...

Stormin' Gorman: I suppose it's fitting that so many of these have NaPoWriMo connections. This one started as a poem I wrote during my very first NaPoWriMo, when I was writing poems about baseball. I'm not sure why, but it was going through my head and struck me as something that could be set to music relatively easily (if not necessarily relatively well).  I don't know if this one has a future, but I could see it making it onto the next album (or the one after)...

The Inevitable Unplugged Found Wanting Support Live Set

When the Gedankenband last released an LP back in 2016, I recorded a few songs from it live and unplugged in support of it.  Since we've just released the Found Wanting EP (available on Bandcamp, Spotify, Amazon, Apple, etc.), I thought I'd do the same. :)

Here's the set! 

It's live, solo, and unplugged, and has three songs from the EP (The DART Song, "All Yours", and When We Look Back To Now) and one oldie ("(Good Luck with the) Woman of Your Dreams", from Not For Having, But For Tasting. 

Enjoy! 

New Release: Found Wanting EP

As previously promised, the newest release from the Gedankenband, the 5-song EP Found Wanting is now available for download at Bandcamp! (Click here: https://andyrivkin.bandcamp.com/album/found-wanting)  The downloads are "name your own price", which includes a free download if you are so moved.  Thanks to Christine Rueter for the amazing cover art!

The EP should also be finding its way onto various streaming services (Spotify, YouTube, Tidal, etc.) over the next few days as well. We're also on track for a fall release of a full album, possibly to coincide with the 20th anniversary of the release of The Red Album... 

Upcoming EP: Found Wanting

Songs at the bottom!

I'm happy to announce that the Gedankenband have some music releases planned for 2020 after a quiet stretch that only saw the release of the 'Oumuamua/Surf Titan! single. While a full album (provisional title: The Hanging Spaghetto Problem) will likely be an ongoing work through the year with a goal of a fall/winter release, after considering another single release we realized there's enough material ready for a 4-song EP.  Or even a 5-song EP, but I'll probably keep it at 4.

We're shooting for a release of that EP (current title: Found Wanting) in roughly a month. The songs slated for inclusion (running order TBD) are:

• All Yours
• The DART Song
• When We Look Back To Now
• Lap of Luxury

While there are some older recordings that may find themselves on the album, all of the EP songs are newly recorded at The Pleasure Grounds over the past month or two, and "When We Look Back To Now" was only written shortly before it was recorded.

As a bit of an amuse bouche, I'll point to two songs. First is an early version of "All Yours", from an attempt at recording it for These are My Monkeys, This is My Circus. This version is kind of over-arranged, using various Garageband loops adapted for its use rather than the more guitar-driven version planned for Found Wanting.  I've been calling this the "Candelabra Version" as a nod to Liberace, who this version eventually reminded me of...   The second is an "acoustic draft" of The DART Song, upon which the final version is being built.

All Yours (Candelabra Version)
The DART Song (acoustic draft)

As Happy As You Make Me: Pearl Anniversary

tl;dr: three links at the bottom to different versions of a song celebrating its 30th birthday.

One of the main things I've been doing in this blog, other than posting NaPoWriMo poems before I mostly took those to Twitter, is marking anniversaries of my songs that I particularly like and/or are particularly meaningful. For instance, I posted about the 20th anniversary of Wrong Place, Wrong Time, the 25th anniversaries of If I Can't Be and Down from the Skies, the 30th anniversary of Watching Rainbows, and not-round number anniversaries of other songs.

It's been a few years, but I'd like to mark a 30th anniversary of one of my personal favorites, As Happy As You Make Me, written 30 years ago today (according to my notes). I don't remember a whole lot about writing it--I wrote it while on a family vacation in the UK, about the on-again/off-again college girlfriend and original muse I've mentioned here a few times, just as we were ramping up to embark on our longest "on again" stretch (at least officially). This was easily the most challenging original for me to play on the guitar, which I still wasn't really any good at. But Original Muse was very encouraging, and we used to call it "The Spider Song" since my fingers moving around the frets reminded her of a spider walking. I thought I might have the band learn it, but it really wasn't right for them and then I wrote a more suitable song about Original Muse, and that was that. It was in my regular rotation when I'd sit outside my dorm room and play, but I never did the song with any of the bands I've been in, nor was it really an option for any of them. As a result, unlike Down from the Skies or Another Margarita or Solitaire, there aren't a string of recordings of it down through the years.

But as years passed, I've appreciated the song more. It waited until 2009's The Cheese Stands Alone for a Gedankenband version, and while recording it I realized it was a much better song than I remembered. When seriously reconnecting with Original Muse several years ago, The Spider Song was one of her first requests when we were hanging around with a guitar together.  It has worked its way into being something I consider one of my very favorite originals, and trying to be objective about it, likely one of my best. What that says about how my craftsmanship has or hasn't progressed in 30 years is a different topic.

So! 3 versions of "The Spider Song" for you:
As Happy As You Make Me (link to Bandcamp site for The Cheese Stands Alone version)
As Happy As You Make Me (30th anniversary rerecorded unplugged version)
As Happy As You Make Me (early stripped down demo/experimental version for The Cheese Stands Alone)

My Decade in Songwriting

Well, it's a time for decadal retrospectives, and I'm no less vulnerable to those than anyone else.

If you're a regular reader of this blog* you probably know that I've been recording music for quite some time with various bands (both actual and virtual). My music with the Gedankenband can be found on Bandcamp and on Spotify.  I've/we've released an album and several EPs in the decade 2010-2019, and I've made a Spotify playlist with the Gedankenband songs that have gotten the most play** over the decade.  But here I wanted to focus on the songs I've written in the decade rather than those released, since a lot of what is on those releases was written in previous decades.

By my count I've got just shy of 50 songs that I wrote in full or in part during the decade. Not all of them are finished, whether they're lyrics but no music or a verse and a half but no chorus, but 47 are close enough to done that I have recorded a version if only for myself.  Of those, 21 have been recorded in a Gedankenband version, though only 12 can be found on Spotify. The others are mostly songs that have been recorded and are waiting for another album/EP release, though a few might not make it out for other reasons.

The remaining 25 are a mix of goofy experiments, songs recorded for friends, and songs that I recorded for myself. Some of them will no doubt make it onto the next album/EP. Some of them will never see the light of day (and that's OK). One of them was written for a terminally ill friend and shared with her before she passed away, I'm not sure what to do with that one.  However, many of them have already appeared on this very blog.

So, for the curious and as a companion to the Spotify list of Gedankenband recordings of 2010s songs, here's a list of the songs that have been released but aren't on Spotify and/or songs that are only found on this blog. I'll link to both the blog post about them (if there is one) and directly link to the file as well. Since some of the older links from the blog posts are broken, the best way to get to the songs themselves are probably the file links below...

As always, enjoy or don't enjoy, it's your call.

I Get The Grants (2011) (file)
Solitaire: New Deal (2011) (file)
Liara (2012) (Bandcamp site) [Gedankenband]
Marco Polo (2013) (Bandcamp site) [Gedankenband]
(I Couldn't) Keep Taylor Swift Happy (2013) (file)
I'll Never Be (2014) (file)
The MANTIS Song (2015) (file) [Gedankenband]
Song for Sandra, Sort of (2016) (file)
Test Me, Schaller (2016) (file)
Hashtag Leave Me Alone (2017) (file)
Pluto Protest Song (2018) (file)
Canon Romance (2019) (file)

While I'm at it, and repeating what's above:
Complementary Spotify playlist of the Gedankenband songs written in the 2010s
Complementary Spotify playlist of the most popular Gedankenband songs during the 2010s




*which I think accounts for...nobody?
**which isn't that much, really, but I am grateful for all my listeners. :)

Canon Romance

tl;dr: Canon Romance (take 0)

I've been on a bit of a songwriting jag lately. I think a few things are responsible, including a few live performances over the past couple of months, ramping myself up to do some recording, and some old inspirations getting revisited as a result.

This one is newly written today, and I recorded immediately after I finished writing it. It's probably done, though I of course reserve the right to change my mind. :)  It's rooted in the video game RPG practice of having multiple characters available as romantic interests for the main player, but that out of necessity the overall plot has a default assumption of who the romantic interest "should" be, with the overall plot working better in that case. Naturally, I can't find the blog posts from folks discussing this with respect to the game Dragon Age 2 much better than I could, but maybe you can find them.  In any case, canon romances aren't necessarily the fan favorites (cue the Garrus fans from Mass Effect), but since the overall plot assumes them, the arcs seem to be better. So, I was playing around with the idea of whether we have "canon romances" in our real lives, and came up with this song.

In any case, that's a lot of background.

Canon Romance (take 0)

Various people that I'll never be

It's been a while, but I needed a guitar break for various reasons and figured I'd post something. Here's one from the summer of 2014 according to my records, though the last defiant bit just got written. Newly recorded, never released, the song is called I'll Never Be and the link to the mp3 is that blue text bit. You know--you've been on the web before.

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

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

Circus/Monkeys Preview!

I've been finalizing songs for the upcoming near-classic This Is My Circus, These Are My Monkeys, and thought I'd post something here. I've always had trouble singing this one, and was considering solving that problem by making it an instrumental. In the end, I recorded vocals that I think will do the trick (or are good enough), so here's a relic and early preview of the upcoming album!

Straightforward (Instrumental)

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)

Song for Sandra, Sort of

I have been feeling physically terrible for a few weeks. Today is the first day I felt like picking up my guitar, and I thought I'd make the best of it.  While I've been thinking about REM and the 25th anniversary of the release of Out of Time, I decided in the end to do an original of very recent vintage.

I started working on "Song for Sandra, Sort of" while driving across Arizona and California in January. I was thinking about some colleagues and the crazy things we put ourselves through to stay afloat and try to make things better in the field of research science. Most of the words came to me on that drive, though some of them were written along with the music in mid-February. The bridge isn't quite settled in my mind, though perhaps the act of recording will make this the final version. I'm not sure if this song has a future beyond this blog post, but I guess we'll see.  The name "Sandra" was picked to go along with the consonance of the other title words, and because I don't know anyone named Sandra (at least not well)--not unlike the decision to name the love interest in OBAFGKM "Suzanne".

In case it wasn't obvious, it was recorded live in glorious mono all at once. I tend to use Audacity when I record like that.

Voila:
Song for Sandra, Sort of

Test Me, Schaller

So, as has happened before, a meme for my local Twitter gang has turned into a song. This one took a few years to ripen and is slightly different from the actual phrase we use, but such is art.

Chris Schaller is a great guy and the ground system software guy for the HiRISE camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. He also can be kind of snarky (which is part of his charm). After he teased the nearly-equally-snarky Sarah Hörst, she responded "don't test me schaller".  Simple enough. For whatever reason, the term took off (well, for small values of taking off) among several planetary science tweeters, even leading to a T-shirt with the phrase.

I'd thought it would be a good song title. Turns out that "Test Me, Schaller" is even better than "Don't Test Me, Schaller" (at least for me). I'd had the first line/melody for a little while, but finally wrote the rest of it yesterday.  And in the interest of striking while hot etc., here it is:

"Test Me, Schaller" (live to mono)

Don't expect to see this on any albums or anything. It seems a bit too esoteric. :)

Also, Happy Mardi Gras!!

Two for the road

I'll be playing at the Open Mic Night at the upcoming Division of Planetary Sciences meeting.  I've kicked around what song I should do, with a few possibilities out there.  One that I considered but probably won't do is The Astronomers Song.  So I figured I'd record it and post it below.  While I was fumbling through trying to record it I also lapsed into another song of mine that it reminds me of, Girl Next Door.  That one took me several takes, I'm posting the only take that I actually finished.  Both were done live to glorious one-track mono, using the laptop's microphone and Audacity.  Both of these songs date back to the early '90s, and they've both been among my favorite originals.  Neither have been performed live by any of my bands, but both appeared on In-Jokes with Myself.

Enjoy or "Enjoy".

The Astronomers Song
Girl Next Door

While I'm at it, here are the Gedankenband versions:
The Astronomers Song
Girl Next Door

Red Album Anniversary

  

  

I've been recording myself playing music for a long time. As technology improved (along with my musical ability) I've moved from accompanying myself live on cassette to multi-track recordings with Garageband. Sometime in 1999 I got a music recording program for our Windows 95 machine. In the summer of 2000 as we got ready to move from Tucson to Boston, I decided I'd make an album as a keepsake for our friends, the first one I'd digitally recorded and the first one I distributed. The Red Album is the result.

The playlist was a combination of songs that I'd recorded early on while figuring out the new software, favorite songs of mine, and Science Diet's live set. I was able to include Jennifer, Barbara, and Joe, the other members of Science Diet, on a couple of songs (To All the Girls (NSFW) and Taking Matters (also NSFW)), and Jennifer sang backup on several others.  Chris Schaller had access to a CD burner, and made a bunch of copies. I started giving it out on October 24th, 15 years ago.  At the time I was thinking that it'd be the only album I ever recorded, even if DIY. 

It's hard for me to be terribly objective about it. Some of the songs hold up reasonably well, others are more embarrassing to listen to today.  The reaction received was pretty positive, and I believe it made it down to Antarctica one year.  The sound quality is pretty patchy in places, particularly since I had no idea what I was doing.

In commemoration of the anniversary, I'll link not only to its page on the Bandcamp site but put up a few alternate/live versions of some of the songs as played by the bands that...made them famous?

The Red Album (Bandcamp)
To All The Girls (NSFW) -- Science Diet (Live at The Barn, 2000)
Wrong Place, Wrong Time -- Dr. Lüst (Live at Bexley, 1991)
Here We Go Again -- Jury Rig (Live at The Jam Shack, 1993)
Postage Due -- Science Diet (Live, 1996)

The MANTIS Song

Those of you who follow my Twitter feed know that I spent a lot of time over the winter working on a proposal to NASA to fly a mission, named MANTIS. For a variety of reasons I won't get into too many details about what the mission does, but I'm happy to link to a short abstract we wrote about it.

I gave a short talk about MANTIS a few weeks ago, and am giving another one again today.  These are the first presentations of MANTIS to the community, and to celebrate I'm linking to a song I wrote for the mission.

This was written a few months ago to accompany a music video I made for an APL event.  It actually does a pretty good job of covering our science objectives for the mission. :)

So, here again:  The MANTIS Song

The Astronomers Song (Part 2)

Way back in 1990 I wrote "The Astronomers Song", which has been a bit of a go-to song of mine ever since. It focuses on three giants of Renaissance-Era astronomy: Tycho, Kepler, and Galileo. It's a fun little song, and I've always liked it.

Occasionally, I'd think about adding more verses. Over the last couple of days I did just that, adding some much-needed diversity to the mix by singing about Caroline Herschel, Maria Mitchell, and Annie Jump Cannon.

I also happen to be at the telescope right now, observing at the Radcliffe 1.9-m at the South African Astronomical Observatory in Sutherland. I'm in the middle of a long trip and brought my guitar along for company. The observing cadence right now has basically 10 minutes of exposures, then a minute or so of setting up the next one, then 10 more minutes of exposures. Every hour or so there's about 10 minutes of monkeying around to find a new target.

I figured I'd put those two things together and record a quick video of the new verses to the song, which I'm dubbing "The Astronomers Song (Part 2)". I look pretty bleary because I'm in the middle of an observing run and I'm getting over a cold, so please don't judge. :)

Also relevant music:
OBAFGKM (song in question in the lyric "the mnemonic lives on in song")
The Astronomers Song (In-Jokes with Myself version)

Down From The Skies: Silver Anniversary

OK, here's a song that's always held a dear place for me. I wrote it 25 years ago today during the on phase of an on-again/off-again relationship. I'd recently been to some kind of Laser Rock show (as was the style back in the late '80s/early '90s), with a mix of psychedelic music rather than the usual Pink Floyd or Led Zeppelin focus. I remember coming out of there and thinking I wanted to write a song like "Magic Carpet Ride", that Pat could use his fancy new phaser pedal on.

I'd also just TA'd the Intro Observational Astronomy class the previous semester, at a point when the aforementioned relationship was off again but she was taking the class. The second verse was a nod in that direction, with its mention of "so many nights spent under the stars" and reference to bringing her home (since as TA I dropped everyone off at their dorms after driving them back from the observatory in the Mighty EAPS Van (tm)). Between the time the semester ended and the time I wrote this song we were back on again.

This immediately entered the Dr. Lüst setlist, and we played it at both Battle of the Bands appearances.  Dan came up with the riff, which has stuck around ever since. When the relationship was off again, and as we came up with more and more songs we wanted to do, the song slipped out of the setlist. Without Pat and his fancy phaser pedal (or Dan and his keyboard), none of my subsequent bands picked the song up.

However!  I've happily stayed close friends with the subject of Down From The Skies, and it remains a favorite of hers whenever we're together and there's a guitar available. Of course, she also purports to like the songs I wrote about her during the off-again periods of the relationship, so the bar may be low. And while it didn't get onto The Red Album (which was mostly songs that Science Diet did), it did make it onto a subsequent album.

I present here four versions of Down From The Skies, because apparently I can't help myself.  They span the entire period from 1990-2015, from live with Dr. Lüst to live solo to a couple of Gedankenband versions.  Enjoy. But even if you don't, I know at least one person who will. :)

Down From The Skies (Dr. Lüst live at 1990 MIT Battle of the Bands)
Down From The Skies (solo live on Mars Hill, 1995)*
Down From The Skies (from 2005's Do Not Tip Or Rock)**
Down From The Skies (Gedankenband Unplugged version***)


*also about an octave too high for my actual range.
**Yeah, I'm sending you to the Bandcamp page to download or listen there.
***Blame Katsumi for the harmonica, I don't know what she was thinking.

Surf Titan!

Another oldie.  I didn't really intend to post anything so soon after the Passerby post, but it's the 10th anniversary of the Huygens landing on Titan and I remembered I'd written a Titan-centric song long ago.  So I figured I'd record it for posterity. Here for the first time ever:

Surf Titan!