Same Old Song

Another song about a project gone wrong

…and more covers

Courtesy of Blathnaid Conroy

more covers

“I actually didn’t see the cover idea you posted until AFTER I had this idea to send you cover ideas, but I thought I’d send you these anyway. I did this first image from two photos I took in Washington and then I drew the lighthouse. The second idea is just a few public domain images mixed with a still from Xena.”

– Neal Williams

Too funny, and these are fucking great. So Neal, how about a Hard Ground single with one of these covers and your remix as a b-side? I think I like the light house best, but it may just be that it’s so exciting to see “The Project Plan” in writing!

And I’ve been meaning to ask you: if I were to fork up my own to have, say, 200 EPs pressed to vinyl, do you know what I’d be looking at per print, and would you be able to point me to good shop?

cover?

Horns!

Thanks to Joshua Koppeis for taking these up a notch with his deadly trombone.

Hold On

You Come in Waves 

The Spinning Clones Experiment

I’d just started Hold On the night before The Spinning Clones asked me to contribute to a collective recording project where several musicians would take turns re-envisioning one of their ufinished tracks. Hold On was already looking to be a gritty departure from my usual sappy indie crooning, so I thought it would make an apt pallet for taking the original Spinning Clones sample far from it’s own whimsical origin. My mix was already guitar-heavy, so I EQed Andrew’s acoustic guitar out as much as I could and focused on Anne’s vocal layers. Those were still in a different key and different meter form my mix, so I cut them down to a 2-note snippet that fit harmonically and then digitally stretched them to fill the space I’d carved out. She comes in around 1:20:

 Hold On

Check out the original track and other submissions here.

NOAH Promo Soundtrack

A friend of mine just made this documentary/promo for NOAH (National Organization for the Advancement of Haiti), a non-profit working on health care initiatives in Haiti. He scored it all with The Project Plan, and I couldn’t be happier to be a part of it!

Sample-Driven Tracks

ChicagoSong: I found the Convent Way Baptist Church last winter when I was dating a girl that lived in Harlem. We’d been parked in by someone in the congregation (on Sunday mornings it’s legal to double-park along Convent Way, home to several of the big Harlem churches), so we stepped into the church while we waited for service to let out. I started recording, assuming all the while that preacher sound bites would only sound cliche in the context of a musical sample, but then he got to that last line.

You oughta shout “hallelujah!”
Continually, continually,
Continually, continually,
Be in the house, rejoice!

And again, and again, and again,
And again, I say rejoice
Hallelujah, hallelujah!
Bless the Lord

Pray, pray, pray,
Pray until something happens…

Figgy Triumph: These sample were collected from status calls for two software implementation projects I was working on (day job).

79 went in last week
80, 81, 82 went in last week
Wow, busy week
83 is scheduled for Thursday and is still on target
OK
Seventy..84, we’re waiting on the requirement from Brian
OK
And 85, um, just so you know, Jeff, is gonna go in tonight,
so I’m gonna be sending a request through very soon about that one
Thank you, thanks everyone

We need to make a project out of fixing that
Yeah, I, I need to work with him on that
Perfect. I’ll look forward to it

And then in the meantime I was gonna send the various information,
and, uh, and then we’ll also try to eliminate the load balancer and see…
Sure, I, I, I had two conversations with him:
One is, I wanted to find another machine that was slower CPU
Um, some ARM fixed rate periods and stuff like that
That sound familiar to anyone?

New Version of “You Come in Waves”

After some big leaps this weekend, this one is really close to complete. Thanks to Austin Bradley for writing and recording the bass additions.

You Come in Waves

“You Come in Waves”

Started this a couple weeks ago:

Lead on, let down,
Vibrations shake my solid ground again
Through particles you propagate
And honey, these days
You come in waves

Alone at the sink
Draining the blood from the polystyrene
The atmosphere accelerates
And honey, these days
You come in waves

 You Come in Waves