You may remember that one of my songs for February Album Writing Month was "The Subway Sings Somewhere, which combined field recordings of the NYC subway with harmonica and guitar and various loops and electronic treatments to create a song based on the musical tones made by the newer subway trains. Most people identify those tones as the opening notes of "Somewhere," from West Side Story.



The day I made the field recordings (on the way to Staten Island for my dad's birthday), I also shot some video, and today I finally got around to editing them into a video to go with the song. It includes (starting at the two-minute mark) a complete view of "Masstransiscope,” an animated piece by artist and filmmaker Bill Brand that can be seen on the Manhattan-bound BMT tracks between Dekalb Avenue and the Manhattan Bridge.

The abandoned subway station shown at the end is the Cortlandt Street stop on the R/W, one of the World Trade Center stops abandoned after 9/11. I used to get off the train there every day to go to work.

Tags: songs, subways

Meanwhile, back in the real world, I've rerecorded "Kitchen Table," my fifth FAWM song. I rewrote a fair amount of it after workshopping it a few weeks ago, and I am much happier with this version than the original. It's also better recorded, thanks (yet again) to my new Apogee Duet.

I also recorded a new version of "All Sorts Of Grey." I didn't rewrite it at all but the original demo was really bad.

And yes, I feel privileged to be sitting in my comfortable apartment in a city I love spending time rewriting songs.

Tags: songs

So, this month I did some sweet country tunes, some electronica, some funny songs, some strange songs, and some not-quite-song songs. But I haven't really rocked out yet. Reproducing all those guitar parts for the last song (especially the, well, I won't tell you yet where that guitar riff at the beginning comes from but it's a great rock guitar album) made me really want to play some good loud rock&roll guitar. I found a good drum loop in GarageBand and played something Chuck Berry-ish over it (of course, all rock guitar is Chuck Berry-ish), and then played a bass line on the low strings of the guitar. And then, I just went crazy on the harmonica.

The result is my last FAWM tune, "In Like a Lion." Welcome to March.

Tags: songs

I think I'm finished with FAWM for the year. My final song (if you can call it that) was inspired by yet another Facebook meme: "15 Albums That Changed My Life (And Then Some)."

I never do well with "best-of" listings, but rather than making a list I decided to create a medley incorporating references to albums that meant a lot to me. There are a lot more than 15 of them (at least 27) and I will be absolutely stunned if anyone can name all of them. (Mike Skliar found one that was unintentional, so there may be more than the 27 I did deliberately and the one he found.) I will post the answers in a few days but the one hint I'll give you is that the first four references are all to albums from the same year, 1989. And there's one more from that year in the mix as well. (It was a good year.) Oh, and basically everything is a reference.

For the record, there are no samples on this track, and the only loops I used were two percussion tracks. Everything else you hear is either my voice or guitar or harmonica, sometimes treated with effects, but all mine. Some of it is rough but it was a lot of fun (and a lot of work) to create.

Tags: songs

Today's song is The Subway Sings Somewhere, the latest addition to my new genre of music, "electromonica." Although this is probably closer to "industromonica."

New York City's newer computerized subway cars, first introduced about five years ago, have a new kind of power transformer that, when the train starts up, makes a series of tones that sound very musical, with which this song opens. People identify them most often as the opening notes to "Somewhere," from West Side Story.

Every few years, The New York Times notices this, and runs a bunch of articles, most recently a front-page column by the normally more enterprising Jim Dwyer. They've been writing about this at least since 2002 but I guess he didn't bother to read back.

Anyway, this seemed like a good excuse for a song. (In February, everything is a good excuse for a song.) If you can call this a song. It's mostly made up of sounds I recorded in the subway yesterday, mixed with some loops and heavily treated harmonica. Most of the rhythm bed is looped track noise. I'm having fun and doing a lot of experimentation this year for FAWM, and while I'm not exactly sure this works, I very much enjoyed doing it. A video may be along to accompany it later in the week.

Tags: songs, subways

I don't remember the context, but a few weeks ago, songwriter Pat Wictor let drop the phrase "a woman with a suitcase full of vices." I said, "Pat, that's a song title," and he said, "It's yours if you want it." That's the wrong (or right) thing to say to me in February, so my dozenth song for February Album Writing Month is "Suitcase Full Of Vices."

Please don't take it too seriously. I was having fun with the phrase, rhyming city names, and playing some down and dirty blues harp. And the steel resonator. It has no relation to what's been happening or how I'm feeling. None whatsoever. No, really.

I think I'm going to end up with more than fourteen songs this year, and I'm pretty happy with almost all of them. Feels like my best February yet.

Tags: songs

Today's song was a deep excursion into ambient/electronica, which is not where one generally finds a harmonica. You might not find all the harmonicas in "Hold On Let Go," in between the loops and synth parts and electronic percussion and strange electronic accidents I couldn't reproduce but reused liberally.

I recorded this with GarageBand using my Apogee Duet which I am officially in love with. It's got the best-sounding D/A conversion I've ever heard -- my iTunes music sounds amazing played through my stereo now -- but it's a damn good recording interface as well.

Lyrically, this is sort of fitting in with my unintentional February theme.

Tags: songs

Facebook's recent changes to its terms of service, which now claim ownership of content you upload even if you cancel your account, are parodied in "Property Of Facebook," my latest song for February Album Writing Month. The situation is probably not as bad as it sounds (see http://blogs.computerworld.com/facebook_tos for some good discussion) but sober reflection should be no impediment to parody. Or continued use of a tremolo harmonica.

Tags: songs, stupidity

If you're a New York City car owner, my sixth FAWM song needs no explanation. Otherwise, you need to know that we have "alternate-side parking" rules, which forbid parking on one side or the street or the other on certain days, so the streets can be cleaned. The elaborate dance of moving the car, double-parking, and moving back, are deeply ingrained in NYC car culture.



rosefox, note hyphen. :-)

Tags: songs

My fifth song for February Album Writing Month is "The Kitchen Table," a simple country waltz. Unlike every other song I've done for FAWM this year, it's not really autobiographical at all. The basic idea came to me early yesterday morning, but I was too busy to work on it. I sat down to work on it today and finished it off in a few hours, and spent a little more time than usual recording it because both harmonica parts are overdubbed, and I also doubled the guitar part to make it sound a little richer.

The harmonica playing in the background through the song is a tremolo harmonica, which has two reeds for every note, tuned slightly apart for a tremolo sound. It sounds very much like an accordion, for good reason. Harmonicas and accordions are close cousins and most accordions work exactly the same way, only with as many as four reeds per note (and stops to control how many reeds sound). You blow air through a harmonica and select the notes by positioning your mouth and tongue, while you force air through an accordion with a bellows and select notes by pressing keys or buttons, but inside, the same basic things are happening to make the music.

Tags: songs

My fourth FAWM song is "25 Random Things About Me."

If you're on Facebook, you're probably sick to death of being tagged for the "25 Random Things About Me" meme. Apparently, no one on Facebook has ever seen a meme before. I responded early on with a piece of PHP code that prints 25 random numbers, but I kept getting tagged anyway. So I grepped the last year's worth of my LJ entries for those that started with the word "I," saved the first sentence of each to a text file, threw out those that were completely unsuitable, randomized their order, edited and rearranged them a bit, and used them as the "lyrics" for the song. The music is a loop bed built in GarageBand (which, like most Apple software, is simultaneously brilliant and incredibly irritating), plus (of course) harmonica. I really do enjoy electronica+harmonica so it was fun to do some electromonica.

Tags: songs

My third song for February Album Writing Month is a self-referential song in honor of Douglas Hofstadter, whose new book, I Am a Strange Loop, is about our concept of "I." He proposes that our consciousness comes from our ability to be conscious of ourselves; that we are the product of strange self-referential loops. This song is built entirely of loops and feedback, and ends with a re-recorded version of itself. The video makes use of video feedback, a topic he discusses at length.

Tags: songs

An IM exchange with mary_wroth tonight prompted song number two, "Stupor Bowl."

Tags: songs

It's February, which means it's February Album Writing Month again. FAWM is a community project in which thousands of musicians around the world try to write 14 songs in 28 days.

This is my third time doing it, and so far every year has started with a song about a snowstorm in which I take a look at where things are in my life. Two years ago I started off with "Song For a Snowy Sunday Night," and last year my first song was "Saturday Night Snowing Hard," a somewhat more optimistic song inspired by a stormy night driving in rural New York and Pennsylvania. This year's song, "The Sun Shines On St. John's," is positively happy. I just got back from ten days in Newfoundland, and the trip was wonderful on multiple levels.

Many of the things mentioned in the song have shown up in my Flickr stream: Velma's, where we had fish and chips on a snowy day; the snowbanks up above my head; Portugal Cove; the ice along the road; the sunset; and of course the sun shining on St. John's.

Tags: songs

I spent Tuesday in Texas. We had crossed the state line from Louisiana the night before, stopped at San Antonio early in the morning, and by breakfast time we were in Del Rio, the "queen city of the Rio Grande." We spent the rest of the day rolling across ranch country, cactus flats and through small faded towns like Langtry, Sanderson, and Alpine.



It seemed like a minor-key kinda day. The vastness of the state is overwhelming; it's harsh and beautiful and unforgiving. Whatever you think of Texas politics and Texas culture, you cannot deny the power and the history of the state and the incredible fortitude of the people who created it. It has a bloody and brutal history, but so does this entire country; as always, Texas did it bigger and badder, but there's a little Texas in all of us.

Today's song is "Texas (Sun to Sun)." Before the advent of the eight-hour workday, agricultural workers who worked from sunrise to sunset were often said to work "sun to sun." The sun rose and set on the train today without us ever leaving the state.

( Texas (Sun to Sun) )

Tags: photos, songs, travel

I'm freeloading on someone's wireless connection during a stopover in El Paso, Texas. The train is running a bit ahead of schedule so we're sitting at the platform for a little while. I took a walk alongside the train, and it's pretty windy but much warmer than in New York right now. So I'm taking the opportunity to upload yesterday's episode of song-blogging, a new song about New Orleans and Louisiana.



On Monday, I left New Orleans on the Sunset Limited, which goes due west across Louisiana, through New Iberia (home of Dave Robicheaux), Lafayette (hometown to some of my favorite Cajun bands), Lake Charles and then on to Beaumont, Texas (a trip immortalized on Lucinda Williams' Car Wheels On a Gravel Road).

The extremes of history and music and beauty on the one hand, and poverty and toxic waste and corruption on the other, inspired today's song, "Sunset Limited." Playing faux-accordion on a D harmonica, and for the first time on this trip mixing in some Photo Booth performance footage with video and photographs shot from the train (and, in the second half of the third verse, Sunday night in the French Quarter), I put this video together on Monday evening.

I didn't invent the word "song-blogging" but I can't find any instances of it used as a verb meaning writing songs as real-time documentation. It's very different from any songwriting I've done before -- it resembles the speed-writing of February Album Writing Month but the pace is faster and the songs are more immediate, about the things I've been thinking about on that day's travels. If I'd gone to Louisiana or New Orleans on a different day, or if the paper I was reading at Cafe du Monde had not had a huge story on the levee reconsctruction (or lack thereof) I might have written a different song.

Making the accompanying videos is a great way to illustrate the trip and, I think, more interesting than the usual photostream on Flickr. I mean, I'm doing that too, but lots of photos are in the videos that won't be on Flickr either because they aren't that good or because there's just too damn many of them.

"Sunset Limited" also illustrates a few of the problems with doing this. The performances are usually first or second takes of brand new songs and, as a consequence, are pretty rough. And, since I cannot write and take pictures at the same time, I sometimes end up writing about things I didn't manage to photograph. There are no photographs to go with the verses about the dog on the chain and the kids playing outside, but they went by too fast for me to put down the guitar and get the camera.

Observant people will notice two things about the video of me playing the song on the train. Yes, the video is flipped, since Apple's PhotoBooth application behaves like a mirror, and yes, the train is moving very slowly; we ran into some traffic and while I would have preferred to have the scenery flying by, I was running out of daylight. And no, the video is not lip-synched, but like every Apple application, iMovie has some brilliant features and some staggering deficiencies, one of which is that you cannot intersperse photos with video and keep the soundtrack of the video running. So I had to split them up, and then synch the video back to the sound by hand.
( Sunset Limited )

Tags: songs, travel

For the first time in some months I updated the songs on my MySpace profile. I hate the site and its miserable UI, but it's the most important social networking site for a musician, so I should pay more attention to it.

But as I looked at the songs I had up there, I realized that the change I was making had more to do with shuffling the songs around. Things have changed, dramatically, since the last time I added new songs. The last thing I added was the "John McCain Blues" video, and, well, he is down the drain. It's not relevant anymore, thankfully.

I also removed "Dear Leader," a song I wrote after the 2004 elections that began, "When I was young / We used to have elections." The idea for that song came in a conversation at Rocky Sullivan's, the now-defunct political watering hole, during the nightmare of the Democratic National Convention. That was a much darker time, and maybe we'll be able to look back at it as the low point of a bad period, rather than a harbinger of more frightening things to come.

So it's gone, and maybe I'll have some more optimistic songs in the future. I think we all owe it to ourselves, and to our country, to practice hope not as a slogan but as an attitude, as an inspiration, as the impetus to get out there and do the work that must be done. Some of that work will be activism and volunteering, but a lot of that work will be in everyday life, in conversation, in the way you respond to someone who talks about how government never works, or Obama will never really make a difference, or all politicians are crooked. To the extent that any of those things are true, they're true because we allow them to be. Because we're complicit in our despair and inaction.

It's time to end that. Hopeful songs are harder to write than cynical songs. It's easier to be snarky and cynical than to believe you can actually make a difference. But it's worth the effort. Look what we were able to do this year.

( Other songs I added )

Tags: politics, songs

I am, strangely enough, feeling almost optimistic about the election. Partially because of something Obama said in an excellent article this weekend in The New York Times Magazine, when the reporter asked him about how he would appeal to the working-class white guys who are so opposed to him.

“If I’m able to change this,” he told me on his plane, meaning the cultural breach in our politics, “then it’s probably going to be most powerful after I’m elected, when you’re no longer in the context of day-to-day battle, and I can prove it by what I do.”

In any case, I decided to redo the old blues "Cocaine" (no relation to the J.J. Cale tune covered by Eric Clapton) changing the refrain from "Cocaine, running 'round my brain" to "John McCain, going down the drain," since that does seem to be what's happening.

( Lyrics )

Tags: politics, songs

I came, I saw, I FAWMed. The songs aren't perfect. Some are pretty rough, others are better than I expected, and some were completely unexpected. But they're 14 songs that didn't exist when this month began.

Tags: songs

Today's FAWM song is "Plastic Bags," a song I've wanted to write for some time. There are plenty of examples of wasteful excess in American culture, but few more ludicrous than carrying a box of plastic trash bags home in a plastic grocery bag that you're going to wad up and throw out in one of the new trash bags you just bought.

(Oh, and here's the article in The New York Times that got me writing this morning.)

Tags: songs, stupidity