music

A Night At The Lakewood

Well the gig Saturday night went surprisingly well. We had only one instance of technical difficulties, though it was a recurring one. Since Trumby thought it would be a good idea to prop his bass up on a rolling chair in the studio last month, it’s been acting a little differently. Dropping two feet to a concrete floor below can do that to an instrument. So the bass wouldn’t stay tuned, and he’d have to adjust the bridge after every song. But other than that, it went without a hitch.

I posted a few pictures on the site, and Trumby has a few more I’ll post once he strolls in to work here. I think he’s working like nine to five these days. What a way to make a living!

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  • Reading time:2 mins read

Minnesota Chronicles, Vol. 2

It’s Monday now; I’m heading back home tomorrow. I’ve taken quite a few pictures, but I don’t think I need to share them with you. How many pictures do you really need to see of a snowy hillside with snow-covered trees? There’s really just not a whole lot else to see here. It’s pretty, but it’s like some certain races of people. It just all looks the same.

I went to Guitar Center the other night just to get some play time in. Being out of town without one of my guitars is deafeningly shitty. I can’t stand not being able to pick one up and play it whenever I want to. I long for it. Like a junkie needs his heroin, or a nymphomaniac needs good hard sex – I need my guitars. I have to feel those hard metal frets and tight copper and steel strings beneath my fingertips. So I went to GC to play for a while. To get my fix.

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  • Reading time:4 mins read

Minnesota Chronicles, Vol. 1

What’s there to say about the fine state of Minnesota? Uh, well we’ll see if we can find anything worth saying. I flew in this morning to visit a friend, and – having never been here before – wanted to see the sites. Or is that sights… Either way, there were some things rhyming with “ites” that I had come to see. Let me back up a little though.

I’ll start with the plane flight. We were delayed in taking off by almost an hour. Sigh. Okay, I don’t mind sitting in the terminal. I started a paperback my friend Jim had given me. Called Jupiter. By Ben Bova. Have you read it? Well it may be the kind of book you only read in airport terminals, I’ll have to wait and see. Anyway, I had my iPod playing and was making eyes with a couple of honeys, so I wasn’t terribly upset. Fifty minutes late, we finally boreded. (Boarded. Yeah, I’m full of it today.)

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Copperwound Chronicles Vol. 2

So we had our first gig Saturday. Since no one else wants to write anything, I’ll write about that. It went well, thanks for asking! We began our set at about 8:00, and kicked it off with a bang, playing Soulhat’s Prayin’ for Rain. Everything was going just dandily until our fourth song, where all of a sudden, the door flew open and someone waved, and half the bar cleared out in less than twenty seconds.

Bar fight! Except that it wasn’t actually in the bar. It was outside. A full-on biker fight though, it was! Exciting stuff. Except that it was the lead singer of the headlining band who had gotten jumped. These two guys had been sitting at the end of the bar for a couple of hours waiting for him to show up. And my friend Brandy had been talking to them.

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Copperwound Chronicles Vol. 1

People ask me quite frequently “how I come up with this stuff”, referring to my writing – be it music or fiction or otherwise. And the simple answer is, “I just don’t know.” But that’s sort of a copout too. Creative energy is like a good beer. The more you have, the more you want, and the more it keeps flowing. Right through you. At least if you have a small bladder like I do.

I wanted to journal some of the ways I’ve written music though, partly for those who wonder how it happens, and partly so that when they’re nickelbacking it on the radio, I’ll remember how it all came to be.

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Backstage Pass

My dad was in the music distribution business for thirty-five years or so. To me this translated to many perks, because though he sold the hell out of all the popular artists, he scarcely liked any of it. I was therefore given boxes and boxes of albums, CDs, tapes, stickers, promo posters, album artwork, concert tickets and backstage passes. My room as a teenager was covered with shiny colorful posters of hundreds of bands – most of which I’d never even heard. By the time I was twenty I’d probably been to a hundred concerts.

I have a few stories of those encounters – some of which are forgettable – but others are pretty good, and good for punk rock points. I would work summers at the distribution plant, stacking CDs on shelves, pulling stock from boxes and other miscellaneous bullshit. I was thirteen, fourteen, fifteen at the time. And they paid me one CD per hour. That wasn’t bad considering. I had a free ride at home, so I didn’t really need money as much as I needed the music.

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SpaceBrew Movie Review: Closer

I’m not big on movie reviews. I think they give too much away. Well, so do previews. But I don’t like when people tell me what parts are excellent in the movies they just saw. Then you’re watching for that part, and it never lives up to what they said it was, and so you’re distracted and it makes the rest of the movie kind of just suck and – well, you get the point. I just want to say this about the movie “Closer”. God wow.

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Shit on the Radio

We all know that the quality of music these days has suffered pretty drastically. And thus the standards have dropped, so we expect less of our musicians – if you can even call them that these days. And with lowered expectations, it’s easier for shitty bands like Mediocre Charlotte (See what I did there?) and Simple Plan to “break in” to the music scene where truly they don’t belong.

And of course instruments and pedals and effects processors and pre-amps and synthesizers and harmonizers and all this other gear makes it easier to make music without really having any talent. And who suffers for it? We do! All these singers who try to sound like Eddie Vedder are kind of phasing out, and we’re left instead with all these singers who try to sound like Tom DeLonge, who is altogether less desirable in the vocal department.

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SpaceBrew Review: Dido Concert DVD

You know, I think Dido is way underrated as an artist. For the last few years I’ve thought Dido was the name of the band, and that Florian Cloud Armstrong was just the singer of Dido, the band. I didn’t realize Dido was a solo artist. Anyway, the point is that I think Dido is underrated. And I’m talking about Dido the band here.

Oh holy shit you can see right down her shirt whoaDido herself is a good singer, but I think it’s the band that makes her great. My perception is that Florian’s voice isn’t quite as strong as she is, though she puts as much into it as she can, trying to make it more powerful. You can see her just giving it everything she has, and her voice just kind of comes out. It’s quite sad actually, though not at the expense of quality. She sounds pretty awesome. I’d liken it to a car with a governor on the carb.

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Happy Birthday, Space

Last night, for my birthday, Mellowship let me get up on stage and play a few songs with them. It was exciting to be back up on the stage finally, with a whole band behind me. All my coworkers showed up to cheer me on and get their drink on. Here are the photos.

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