Song-A-Day 2023

Continental Transit

Get Out of the Way took a bit longer to finalize than I’d planned, mostly little fiddly bits that nobody care about but me, but by the time I’d posted it, I had to go to the airport to pick Mary up. Then a quick bite to eat, then a bit of chit chat, then the neighbors invited us over to hang out… I got back to the house in a less sober state than I’d left, watched some TV, played a little Animal Crossing, then got started on today’s song. The reason I wasn’t panicked is that I’d already … Continue reading

Get Out of the Way

I spent about five hours yesterday battling a hippy-happy-house track. The track wasn’t the problem, it was the lyrics. Happy lyrics, as you may know, don’t often come naturally to me. After a short procrastination break at the neighbors I came back and worked for another 30 minutes before saving the project into the “sketches” folder and starting a new one. I thought this pivot, as they so often are, would end up being an ambient or lo-fi melodic instrumental track, but look what happened… The opening motif gave me one of those moments where the whole thing snapped into … Continue reading

D-13

With yesterday’s production requiring a bit more time in the morning for finalizing, I didn’t get started on today’s track in earnest until the early evening. There were a couple of false starts, mostly because the lyrics were awful, and then I decided to go ahead and use the song prompt provided by a friend after hearing day 1: “I would like to hear how you destoy the enemy.” Initially, the lyrics you hear were only going to be an introduction or chorus, and I’d planned on some kind of sarcastic take on Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals and other … Continue reading

Destroy the Enemy

Well, so much for the plan. While I hadn’t really imposed any constraints for myself in the lead up to this year’s Song-A-Day, I sort of had a loose plan that I’d be cutting back a bit on production work and doing simple arrangements. My hope was that by stripping things back, I’d work more on writing actual songs. This track originated in a quick drum and bass sketch I came up with a couple of days ago while exploring the amazingly awesome Superior Drummer 3 library I picked up over the holidays. While I love Stylus RMX, I kept … Continue reading

Seriously?

It seems like I’m asking that rhetorical question on an almost daily basis. I ask it when hearing about the latest victimization fad or while watching society becoming more and more brittle. I ask it as we combat racism, intolerance, and fascism by using racism, intolerance, and fascism without a hint of irony or self-awareness. I ask it every time I come across the general bitching by every tribe about how bad things are in what is, by almost any objective measurement, the best time in human history to be alive. So given that opening paragraph, you might be surprised … Continue reading