Sunday, November 26, 2006
And That Concluuuuudes Another Holiday
Well, that holiday is over with. I apologize if my indifference toward these things is offensive to anybody. I'm glad if you had a nice time. I'm sorry if you didn't. I never felt the need to go on and on about it in either case. I look at the holiday thing as just another commercial opportunity and possibly a day off and possibly an excuse to meet with people you love. I know it doesn't always turn out that way. I don't care to write much about it. I wrote a couple of songs about it and dumped them.I've always had an aversion to things repeated and cliche's. It's very hard to recognize your own cliche'. I depend on others to tell me when I do it in lyrics. I know, I know, one person's bright idea is another person's cliche' but it never hurts to have a trusted crap detector at your side.
Consequently my lyrics and even musical phrases tend to change a lot. Both out of boredom and an eventual realization that it may be cliche'.
So in light of that, I'm posting first-take work tapes of some songs. This is how they were at the time I recorded them, rushing to get done late at night before I collapsed into unconsciousness. They will most certainly evolve. I wish I could separate them into separate posts but the geekiness of all this software and upload/download nonsense has just worn me out completely. This is all I have the energy for now.
I'd like to suggest that today you just listen to the cut called The Silence There. And perhaps comment on that. It's the one I posted about a short while ago that came to me out of the blue, both words and music together. This method running counter to my old way of lyrics first then music much later. It seems to be about my recent interest in some ideas regarding quantum mechanics. I was energized by the film "What the Bleep Do We Know?" A nuclear engineer friend of mine swears the ideas in there are mostly crap. I certainly don't know what to believe. But I don't actually believe in anything so what's the difference? There's surely a song coming about the belief/non belief thing but I don't believe I'll set a deadline for it.
So on to The Silence There if you'd like to listen. I'm sure it'll sound much better with drums and base and an untired voice. I used two guitars and a tiny bit of reverb on one of the vocals. Then I went to bed. Just click the first song today, please. I'll tell you abut the others later.
posted by Bud @ 8:49 PM
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Monday, November 20, 2006
Golfwidow and Andy
I've been friends with the delightfulGolfwidow and the hystericalAndy Martello since my earliest days of blogging. The fact that they are doing a podcast together just tickles me. I hope you'll click this badge and check it out. I'll remind you from time to time. I'll also remind you that Golfwidow has written a very entertaining book called Getting My Think On. You can check it out here. It'd make a perfect gift for another blogger or anyone for that matter, who enjoys good witty writing.
posted by Bud @ 9:43 PM
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Tuesday, November 14, 2006
Two Days, Two Songs
The second song I wrote spontaneously with words and music together came a day after the last one I posted last week. If you're behind in this discussion, just look back a couple of posts to Sounds In the Silence.I had just brought home my new Taylor GS. I'm addicted to Taylors. They just feel perfect in my hands. Unlike any guitar I've ever picked up. I won't get involved in a what's better, Martin or Taylor or whatever. Taylor is perfect for ME. So I keep buying them. This new one is a new body design with a fuller tone. A different flavor Taylor altogether. I got the maple/Sitka spruce model with the Expression System added so I can plug in at gigs. Don't want to smack that baby up against a microphone, ya know?
I finally got to sit down and try it at home the morning after I go it. I had just been reminding myself about augmented chords and I started to refamiliarize myself with them. D major to D augmented. Pretty. Some words I had started to write when Cathy was off on a trip last Thanksgiving started to come to mind but I couldn't' recall one single phrase. Just the essence of what I had been thinking. I like a little solitude but I don't like loneliness. I have a song on that subject on my first CD, To Be Alone. Lonliness is especially pronounced when you are submerged in someone's presence even when she is glaringly absent. So, mysteriously, this song poured out in another twenty minutes. I had to put down the new guitar and go to my computer with the Baby Taylor so as not to knock a big hunk of new tone wood into my desk. But here it is without benefit of a rewrite. I like the way this one sounds and I promise to do a quick and dirty demo as soon as I can. The drywall dudes are finished in my new studio. Flooring comes next!
CAN'T LEAVE MY MIND
Copyright 2006 by Bud Buckley
I feel you in all the places that you've been
I hear you in the silence, I hear you in the wind
In the dust I see the traces you left behind
You can leave anyplace but you can't leave my mind
I see you in the things you've left out of place
I see your creases in the chair and in the mirror I see your face
Well, everyplace you've been is everyplace you've left your sign
You can leave anyplace but you can't leave my mind
Bridge:
You blow through my hair here even when it's still
I feel you in everything you've touched
You seep into me against my will
Well I could try to fill these spaces with things that aren't you
I could decorate in colors of another hue
I could try to erase you from this place and time
But you can leave anyplace and you'll never leave my mind
Yeah, you can leave anyplace but you'll never leave my mind.
posted by Bud @ 10:33 PM
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Sunday, November 12, 2006
Some Randomness is Allowed From Time to Time
My good friend Michael Manning is a prince. If you know anybody in the southern Ohio area, could you please forward this link to them to help out a young girl that Michael and Rick Springfield are trying to save.Also it would raise her spirits if you'd visit her site and leave some cheer!
Remember I predicted a while back that there would be problems with the electronic voting machines in certain places? I know because I've watched the pattern here in Florida. Sometimes I hate it when I'm right.
The drywall (Sheetrock) guys are not finished yet. One and a half rooms and we are in over a week.
Coffee House gigs might not pay well but they are often more satisfying.
I may have found a nail product that isn't so hard on my fingers. It's designed for guitarists too. This is good news as acrylic material is obviously too harsh on me after all these years. Stay tuned.
Is anybody but me weirded out by the fact that Google robots read my e-mail and offer me ads that relate to my content? Am I supposed to be comfortable with the fact that Google says no humans read my mail?
Should I do a benefit concert for a group that is too disorganized to answer their e-mail about questions related to the audience and the equipment and the type of room? Yet they still write to me a month later and ask why I haven't faxed them my entertainment agreement. I have a feeling they're not gonna raise much money.
How much do I love living in a place where you can go outside at night in November in shorts and a t-shirt? Even if this state has it's own Fark weird news tag and voting fraud is so obvious that nobody can believe it. And there is that hurricane threat thingy but my house is built like a bank vault. Oh, and somebody is occasionally eaten by an alligator. But Rush and Jerry Springer live here, making gators look good. Everything is relative, I guess. But to me the weather is the important thing.
posted by Bud @ 8:49 PM
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Thursday, November 09, 2006
A Song From the Silence
Those of you who read me regularly know that I struggle to write words and music at the same time. My song writing pal, Kathy Feeney, and I have been doing words first for about five years. Of course that only netted five songs. With Helen Avakian, it could go much faster as she writes music with the speed of a juke box. But she's way more particular than I am about lyrics and so that slows it down to about 12 hours per song. Still, that beats my usual time by just under 12 months. I want to write with Carie Pigeon and a few other friends but she's a noodler by her own description. She noodles around on the guitar until a song, words and music, come together. My student Jim Salhoff writes sort of this way. He has song fragments come to him while he's at work and he stops to write them down then goes home and works them out on the guitar from what he remembered of the tune he had in his head while he was working on machine parts! Now that's impressive. He's a terrific songwriter too. Then, as I reported recently, my student James Braha made the leap from lyrics first to music and lyrics together and has churned out about four or five songs in three weeks.So I had to give it a try. But it wasn't working. Then one morning a week or so ago I was hopping around on the net and a song file opened. I have no idea who it was. Could have been a pro or a MySpace thing. But the lyric refrain was "at the science fair." I thought they were singing "The silence there" at first. When I realized it was "science fair" I was relieved because I really wanted to use "silence there." So I did.
I took a stab at writing around that phrase spontaneously with guitar in hand. A discordant riff came up first and a progression with the opening phrase came rushing out. Alas this just poured out of me in under 20 minutes. There's a first time for everything. As for meaning, I'm gonna leave you (and me) guessing. It came on the wind as Kathy Feeney would say. I no longer believe in Freudian psychology. I'm more into quantum theory these days. So this came from an alternate universe my atoms are living in when they're not here. YOU figure it out. I got a song out of it.
I know, I know, it's not gonna have much impact here and now without the sound file but I don't have a sound file yet. I'm working in a tiny little room with my stuff piled randomly in two rooms. But my studio is progressing and I'll get you a sound file when I can. Promise. In the meantime, If you are so inclined, I'd love to know what YOU think this thing means. I have some idea, of course, but I'm not saying. If I'm gonna write a song this way, I'm gonna shut up about what was going through my mind when I was writing. It works for Dylan so why not.
The very next day I wrote another song the same way. More on that next post.
The Silence There
Copyright Bud Buckley November 2, 2006
Sometime s I think I'm living in the wrong place
Sometimes I think I left too much behind
Sometimes leaving the rat race
Doesn't always treat you kind--ly
Sometimes nothing seems fair
I need the silence there
I need the silence there
I remember where I was
I can't go back and rearrange it
I can't remember where I'm going
It's only here that I can change it-- you see
To change the past would certainly be rare
But I need the silence there
I need the silence there
I need to keep my head here on my own neck
I need to keep my eyes here on my face
I need to keep from steering toward that train wreck
I need to make this a quiet place -- for me
It's a challenge not to sit backwards in this chair
But I need the silence there
I need the silence there
Late Extra:
PLEASE GO HERE RIGHT NOW and help my good friend Michael Manning with this project. It's a life and death kind of thing.
PLEASE GO HERE RIGHT NOW and help my good friend Michael Manning with this project. It's a life and death kind of thing.
posted by Bud @ 8:52 AM
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Wednesday, November 08, 2006
What's That I hear?
The sound of the phone NOT ringing with some hate call from a local pol who just bought himself an election.My good friend The Laughing Frog posted this
The Midland
Take More Quizzes
to define your accent. I don't put a lot of faith in these things but I'll be damned if it didn't nail me for being from Philly/South Jersey. That's pretty good. If you do this, let me know if it pegged you right too, please. Most of these quizzes are so filled with prejudice and exist for the sake of making some joke that I find them worthless. "What kind of underwear are you?" and that sort of thing. I love the one that said I was 23 years old, though. Kind of a reverse MySpace. I didn't use it to try to get a date. Trust me.
I'm putting all the election stuff out of my mind for now. My neighbors and friends are not into gloating, I return that favor and this is a good arrangement. My weekend, however was outstanding. At the first seasonal gig at Bella Luna Cafe, I had invited two guests. Simon Wiffen is a singer/songwriter from Leeds, England who contacted me that he was going to be in the area. He performed a few of his songs for us and he was a delight to listen to. You should check out his music. Leeds isn't far from York where i find the accents a bit hard to work out at times but Simon's accent was quite clear to me.
My young pal Carie Pigeon plays on the same circuit that I do. We overlap here and there. She got me playing harmonica and got me thinking abut writing songs spontaneously rather than my lyrics first routine. I'll blog about a breakthrough there for me soon. Carie drove down from St. Pete to see me play so naturally I got her up to do a song with me and she did a set of her own while I took a break and chatted with Simon. I think you'll like Carie's sound a lot. She's gonna be on my CD.Sunday brought our neighborhood block party. I always play it to avoid eating too much. It's always fun and I'll continue doing it twice a year. Big crowd and getting bigger every time as more houses are built and more people decide to stay here all year instead of doing the snow bird thing.
My studio is getting drywall this week. I have always called that sheetrock. Does give away my Philly/New York background? I can't wait to move into the new studio, my recording has come to a standstill, I need to record to refine songs. Yeah, I know that's a lame excuse but it really is the best I can come up with. If I were Andy and this were Tuesday, I'd do a Ten Things Tuesday on why I can't make any progress with the existing new songs. I think I'll just settle on I'm tired,I'm busy and I'm not in my place. But, as I said, I did write some newer songs. Later on that.
posted by Bud @ 11:26 AM
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Sunday, November 05, 2006
Don't Vote for Me and I Won't Have to Call Anybody Names or Lie
I know for a fact that this isn't true but I kinda love seeing it anyway. What the hell, It's election time, I can lie my ass off like everybody else.
How'd you like to put your name in and find out that there is NOBODY in the US with that name? A bunch of my friends are nonentities according to this site. There are only 464 people with the same name as my wife. They are usually using the same doctors and banks as her too. She routinely gets the wrong information. Usually unhappy.
Back to elections. Have you received any push poll phone calls yet? I have. Guess which party is doing that? Yes the one with the most money who panders to bigotry and religious intolerance. That one. I'm a totally nonviolent person. I get along with people of all political persuasions. I won't listen to any religious bullshit but I'm polite about it. Why, then, am I having thoughts like "die in a fire" about some of the local pols?
My prediction: Any very close election that is being run by the new electronic voting machines will go to the party that financed them and runs the election commission in that voting district. We already proved it in Florida. Maryland and Ohio seem to have had some experience with that too.
But vote anyway, please. My motto is:
Vote or STFU.
posted by Bud @ 7:11 AM
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