Please Do Not Get Arrested
And if you do, please do not mention my name to the police.
It is a very special day in Coultonland, a day I like to call “The First of May.” This is a free country, or at least it was until Obama was elected,* and so I do not presume to tell you how to celebrate it. I have no doubt that whatever you do, you will be sure to obey the law and comply with local ordinances. Also please remember that poison ivy has three shiny pointy leaves.
I myself will mostly be staying indoors, but I have already rubbed a couple of butts – no, they were PORK BUTTS, and I rubbed them with SPICES you pervert. What is wrong with you? Later I’m going to cook them on the GIRL.
My gift to you is this mp3 of a relevant track from “BEST. CONCERT. EVER.” You do not have to get me anything, in fact, I think I would prefer that you didn’t.
Happy Spring!
* Sarcasm
What Is Happening? (TL;DR)
Hello! If it seems like I’ve disappeared from the internet it’s because I’ve been in prison. Kidding! They have the internet in prison!
First, please note that the following shows are happening:
May 7th-9th
MaxFunCon!
Lake Arrowhead, CA
Pretty sure it’s too late to get tickets to this, but even so: http://www.maxfuncon.com
Thursday May 13 at 8PM
The Hat Factory in Richmond, VA
With Paul and Storm
Tickets: http://bit.ly/9DUbkg
Friday May 14 at 9PM
The Lincoln Theater in Raleigh, NC
With Paul and Storm
Tickets: http://bit.ly/9yGzhH
Saturday May 22 at 8 PM
Sympho’s “Tweetheart”
Church for All Nations in NYC
Sympho is an orchestral concert series run by my friend (and fellow Whiffenpoof!) Paul Haas. Tweetheart is an evening of classical, electronica, and pop songs about love. I’ll be doing one of my songs that he’s arranged for the symphony – it’s going to be really cool I think.
Tickets: http://bit.ly/awryfl
Thursday May 27 at 7:30PM
Just for Laughs in Montreal, QC
With Paul and Storm
Tickets: http://bit.ly/aBraSC
If you think I am not going to do “Re: Your Brains” in French while I am in Quebec, then you are crazy. There are still PLENTY of tickets available, if you know what I mean.
Friday May 28 at 8PM
Gladstone Theater in Ottawa, ON
With Paul and Storm
Tickets: http://bit.ly/92ShRK
Sunday May 30 at 8PM
Enwave Theater in Toronto, ON
With Paul and Storm
Tickets: http://bit.ly/98K68o
And now for the long wordy part in which I talk about me.
Yes, I have been hiding out of late. You may have noticed my last blog update was OVER A MONTH AGO, and I’ve been awfully quiet on the Twitter. And of course I continue to completely ignore Facebook and MySpace, though that’s mostly because I am an old person. This year had a busy start with a lot of touring, all really great shows with some lovely audiences, including the exciting opportunity to open for They Might Be Giants for a few shows. But all that travel time and road food and T-shirt counting tires me out. I have been resting.
As I keep saying in interviews, “Whine whine, success is a terrible burden, etc.” I was as surprised as anyone when Thing a Week started generating audiences and income, and the last few years have been about sorting that out: figuring out how to play live and tour, tweaking the business side of things, counting huge stacks of cash, finding a decent helipad maintenance team, the usual. There hasn’t been a lot of song writing, which is supposedly a large part of my job. I understand now why bands tour for a while and then stop so they can write the next record – it’s very hard to write anywhere near a tour, especially when you’re running everything yourself. Sometimes I feel more like a traveling salesman than a musician.
So I’m going to keep a much lighter tour schedule for a while, and I’m going to really buckle down and make some music. For serious this time. Not even jocoserious, I’m talking SERIOUS serious. In fact, I am currently working on a thrilling super-secret project, and if it comes together I’ll be able to talk about it very soon. I’m slightly terrified about it, which means it’s probably the right thing to do. And it will involve lots of new music and creative stretching and growing, which is something I desperately need if I’m going to stay engaged and satisfied and relevant. Thing a Week was excruciating, but I miss it. I’m ready for The Next Project, and I think I finally know what it is.
So that’s why it’s been quiet around here, and I promise it’s going to get less quiet soon. In the meantime, thanks for your patience and continued support.
P.S. Does anybody know how to write songs?
Rock Band Network Is Live
A while ago the fine folks at Harmonix contacted me about the Rock Band Network, a way for artists to independently get their music into the game. They’ve gone through a long process of working out the kinks, and yesterday the new store went live. I’ve currently got four songs in there: Code Monkey, Creepy Doll, The Future Soon, and Ikea (Still Alive, Skullcrusher Mountain, and RE: Your Brains were already in the regular Rock Band store). There are some more in the pipeline that should be ready in a couple of weeks, and I intend to add more as we go. For the first 30 days this will be exclusive to Xbox, but after that they’ll make select tracks available on the Playstation and the Wii.
And it’s not just me, there’s going to be a lot of great stuff in there. I’ll quote the press release, because I find it hilarious to read my name in this list:
There are currently more than 100 songs available for purchase in the Rock Band Network Music Store from artists including The Shins, The Hold Steady, The Main Drag, Bang Camaro, of Montreal, Jonathan Coulton, Skeleton Witch, 3 Inches of Blood, Lacuna Coil, Stroke 9, and Steve Vai*. There are more than 300 artists in the RBN pipeline, with additional tracks already on the way from Flight of the Conchords, The Smashing Pumpkins, Twin Atlantic, All That Remains, Clutch, Prong, The Gaslight Anthem and many more coming soon.
Right next to Skeleton Witch!
Anyway, enjoy. I’m really excited about it – yet another way for smaller fish to play in the big pond. Viva la revolucion!
Pre-Songs
Bored on an airplane from Phoenix to San Diego by way of Salt Lake City (what?) I opened my laptop to do a little musical messing around and got distracted by a folder filled with old ideas. I’ve learned the hard way that when I get a little nugget of something that might be a song, it’s important to capture it before I forget it. At a certain point song ideas are like dreams – they’re in my short term memory and they feel pretty solid, but they’re really not stored anywhere permanent. Let a couple of hours go by and they completely disappear. So I’ve gotten in the habit of opening the laptop and hitting record.
Some of you might find these interesting from a (pardon me) “historical perspective.” The quality is terrible, they are extremely raw and not meant to be listened to, they’re recorded in Ableton Live through the laptop mic, and often I can’t actually play them correctly. But generally they’re the very beginning stages of my process, when I’ve got a line or two maybe, a guitar part I like, a chord change I want to use, etc. You can hear the lyric technique I use at this point, which is to sing nonsense syllables as I’m figuring out the melody (and sometimes what the song is about). Some of these ideas get completely blown apart along the way and reworked into something else, some of them stick pretty much as they are. It’s funny for me to go back and listen to them because a few of them changed quite a bit – it’s like bizarro world, where all the songs turned out just a little different.
A Talk with George
The file for this one is called “sad irish,” not sure what that means exactly. I don’t think I was planning on writing a song about a sad Irish person, probably I was referring to the style, though it isn’t particularly Irish at all actually. You can hear me reminding myself how to play it in the beginning. The verse melody is mostly there, but different. No bridge yet, no Plimpton either. This version floated around until I connected it with the Plimpton idea and started fleshing out actual lyrics. Usually deciding on a subject or a point of view helps cure the melody, makes it settle down and decide what it’s going to be – there are certain choices you have to make once you’re using actual words. The guitar part in the second half of the verse is mostly complete at this point, that stuck pretty well through to the finished song.
I wish I had a record of the lyric-writing process on this one. For the longest time it was third person – George did this, George did that – and I hated it. It felt very gimmicky. And then somewhere in there I switched it to the second person, as if George was giving you advice. That softened the “wikipedia” feel of listing George’s accomplishments, and gave it depth enough to be about something more complicated.
Big Bad World One
There are three clips here. The first one starts with what eventually became the pre-chorus, and as you can hear it started as a much sadder song – the title of the file is “What If.” I can’t play it properly yet at this point. I’m glad I ditched the second part of this one, it seems to just kind of wander aimlessly.
The second clip was part of a different thread, the one that became the song. It’s the verse and the chorus but I haven’t yet decided to steal from clip 1 for the pre-chorus. The last line of the chorus is there, a couple other hints of where the lyrics were headed. I think it’s safe to say that at this point I had just figured out what I was writing about – that last line pretty much sums it all up.
The third clip has more worked-out lyrics, plus I’ve put the two pieces together. It’s out of order, the pre-chorus lyrics here actually ended up in the third verse, but you can see how they evolved from the original “What If” idea. This is the point in the process when writing gets easiest – there’s a pretty well-formed point of view, a verse, a chorus, both with lyrics. I think of this as having “broken the back” of the song. From here on out it’s just a question of filling in the details.
Blue Sunny Day
The first clip is from a song I was calling “My Nemesis,” not sure exactly what it’s about, and I may come back to that idea someday. The second section is the chord progression and melody that would eventually become the pre-chorus of Blue Sunny Day. There’s also an idea for a bridge, which now sounds boring enough for me to wonder why I bothered capturing it.
The second clip has a great intro guitar part, which I’m glad to have come across again because I still may want to use it somewhere. You may recognize a little figure near the end of that intro section, which is a little picky thing on a G13 chord that now happens between halves of the verse in BSD. The verse chords are there with a completely different melody, and I’ve also figured out the modulation that happens between verse and the pre-chorus section stolen from clip 1. Haven’t yet figured out the modulation back that happens shortly after. I remember that this chord progression floated around in my brain for months, I would just sit and play it waiting for it to take me in some direction. At that point it’s usually time to pick a subject and push it through, because I can dither around with a musical idea until I am bored to death and start to hate it. At some point I would find the line “blue sunny day,” and that was the bit that made me decide it was about a sad vampire, much to my chagrin.
Hilariously, there is a file called “Nemesis 3” that I just listened to, and it is me playing an acoustic version of “Never Gonna Give You Up.” So yes, I just rickrolled myself. No idea.
Drinking With You
Chords and melody mostly there, you can hear me mushmouthing around trying to figure out a lyric/melody combination that works. I have the last line, “nice to go out drinking with you,” so I definitely know what the song is about. And I can’t play it AT ALL (and still can’t). I’m a little sorry I lost the turnaround and repetition of the line at the end, which refers back to that dissonant chord in the prechorus (“I know this place that’s near here”). It’s nice, but of course it also just repeats earlier material, so all in all I think it’s better without it.
This is another great example of a song that started out as chords. Like Blue Sunny Day above, I would play these chords and sing along, and somewhere in there found “nice to go out drinking with you.” Once I have a line like that, I just need to figure out who’s saying it and why, and then the rest of the song falls in line from there.
Lady Aberlin’s Muu-Muu
Pre-Song: Lady Aberlin’s Muu-Muu
I wrote this song while on vacation with my family in Cape Cod. We rented a house that had this amazing organ, the old fashioned wooden cabinet kind with two rows of keys, an arpeggiator, a bunch of built-in beats, a bench filled with song books that show you how to play “Lady of Spain” with one finger. I was messing around with Bossanova 2 or something like that when I found these chords, and I had been thinking about Lady Aberlin and the idea of a guy sweetly but weirdly obsessed with this one blue dress she wore (definitely not me). I was hoping to use this organ in the actual recording, so this clip is assembled from a number of takes that I edited together in Abelton Live. But the tempo was all over the place and I am not a great pianist. And anyway it took me months to write the third verse because the form and the rhyme scheme is really tight and constraining.
One of the things that made it hard to play was that I couldn’t do it in C because all the D keys were broken. Keep in mind, this organ was old technology, a lot of wires and tubes and hamsters on wheels. Somewhere in there the D-inator had gone bad, so that every D key on all the keyboards and the bass pedals made no sound. UNLESS you turned on all the effects and sat on it for 15 seconds, then it would make this incredible growling whooshy noise, like a war of angels in an underwater gymnasium. I wish I had thought to record that sound because it was amazing, but I also kind of like that it faded out of existence when vacation was over. LIKE THE NEIGHBORHOOD OF MAKE BELIEVE ITSELF.
That’s all for now, I’ll post some more when I have a chance.
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