Shape the world

The somewhat shambolic release of Shake the World was completed today. I uploaded my cartoon cover to OneRPM and clicked the button that will send the album out to streaming services -- some more quickly than others.

The album is far from slick, but then so was last year. This record is really a record of my 2020, the depression, the anxiety, the increased consumption of various coping things, the difficult learning curve, the intensity of being on the edge.

I could have used this as a demo and then recorded everything properly in a studio, or even more properly in my own studio. But that would have been a different album. There's nothing that says I can't re-record any of these songs if I feel like it. But this album exists, and it is what it is.

The work is not completed until I do some follow-up to see if I can interest anyone in playing this music on good old-fashioned campus and community radio, but I need to do other things as well. Spring is springing. Gardens to tend, books to read, dessert to bake. Drawing more pictures, taking walks, getting back on the bicycle. Getting vaccinated. Getting in good trouble. And soon, no doubt, I will be unable to resist heading back downstairs to Studio Exigu.

For sin she must atone

"Tears of a Crone" started as a riff recorded on my phone, from about the same time as "Edge of Arpeg." It wasn't quite as bouncy at first. It got that way as I played it over and over, imagining different phrasings. Lyrics were not coming to me, and yet I knew it needed lyrics. Unlike "Edge," it didn't have its own melody.

It wasn't long before I was calling the riff "hip-hop." I don't know what prompted me to go in that direction. It's not like white grandauntie had ever demonstrated her flow. But it remained "hip-hop" as I tried to write lyrics.

And then, just as with "Nasty Boy," I found some lyrics. Judging by the notebook I found them in, I had written them not all that long ago, and yet I had no recollection of them. The rhyme scheme was AABB, like a lot of songs I've written. It soon became apparent that those As and Bs needed to be doubled. I threw out an entire verse that sucked, and then basically doubled the remaining doublets. I loved that process! I found I really liked having those four rhyming lines in a row to say what I wanted to say.

The chorus might be tongue-in-cheek. Sort of. Notice sin shows up yet again. Catholicism is hard to get away from!

Metronome, strummed Stratocaster, capo 5. That's the core of the song. Yes, I left the generated rhythm track in on purpose. Djembe felt right for the percussion, and I love any excuse to play it. I improvised off the rhythm guitar. Then I improvised the lead guitar off the djembe. It's odd to have a musical conversation with yourself, but I was really happy with how it worked.

I really enjoyed the chance to record quiet vocals. I do not have a big voice by any means. On my list to order: a decent pop screen. I did learn how to reduce the sound of plosive "p" and "b" hitting the diaphragm of the mic during the mix, because I had to, but much better to prevent it.

I think I'm proudest of this song. It came together late. I have no idea where some of those rhymes came from, but I love these lyrics. They feel very good in my mouth. And this recording was the most problem-free.

It's the answer to "nothing to say" in the opening song. It's a coda to the loud and messy "Shake the World." I had never written anything like it, and I don't know if I will again, but I'm glad I did it once.

Shake the world all over

"Shake the World" was quickly written for the 2017 rock lotto to benefit Girls Rock Camp Vancouver. We needed one more song quickly. I brought in the chords and some lyrics, and the other members of lotto band Stussy (not Stüssy) added their parts.

This song is about young people. Greta Thunberg inspired me. My Millennial bandmates inspired me. Many young people inspire me. I don't say "the kids will save us," but they're often doing their part and sometimes more than their share.

The arrangement is similar to what we did in Stussy. I played drums pretty much as Sunny had done, with the snare off. I played the doubled flanged guitars at the end to evoke Ida's keyboard playing. We did a long outro at the show, and she led it. And finally, I played the bass part that Lauren played in that outro section. The guitar descends from A to G. But the bass plays D to G. That's what makes the odd tension in that chord, because the bass add a fourth to the normal triad chord and changes the feel completely.

This was a technically fraught recording. Many things went wrong that I had to overcome. The live drums that seemed fine before mastering again are fighting the compressor, although on this song that kind of fits. I always intended for the outro to have a psychedelic-era Beatles feel.

Come to Jesus

I wrote "Some Kinda Change" after Lisa's Hotcakes stopped playing (we never actually broke up). T-Bone and I practised it in V+T, but I felt it was more a song for me or some band in my head than for the duo. It needed a bass.

The song is some kind of story, but I didn't really set out to tell a story. The suggestions of story evolved out of word play. I seem not to be able to write about nothing. As with several of my songs, there's a relationship in it. The relationship in "The Easy Way" is hetero, but this one's a lez thing. Lesbians having adventures. People in my songs have the adventures I don't have.

That snarly guitar near the centre? For years, that and the vocal were the song, and this production stuck close to that feel. In fact, that guitar is a scratch guitar, the one you play first as a guide so you can then add other instruments. I thought I'd replace it, but I liked it better than every other take.

I played live drums again, like "Nasty Boy." I hit the snare on 2 and 4 with eighth notes on the floor tom, all the way through except for the stops in the middle section. I'm old. It was exhausting but exhilarating, but I was happy with the result.

I wish I could have recorded the drums better, but for some reason it had not yet occurred to me that I own a PA, which has a mixing board with six inputs that I could have used to mix several drum mics into the stereo signal that my computer interface accepts. In future, whenever I want to record live drums.

"Some Kinda Change" goes back to my roots in simple, hard-edged music: Neil Young, Keith Richards, the Stooges, the Gun Club, the Jim Carroll Band.  There's sin in here, as in some of my other songs. There's even some Jesus. My approach to music and art are to struggle against both personal and human limitations and to make something good from whatever bits and pieces of talent I have. This song is a good illustration.

Too much love?

I need to draw the cover art again. The last one wasn't good enough, and when I tried to improve it, I made it worse. So it goes. Back to song blog for now.

Sometimes, songwriting grinds to a halt. When that happens, I look for ways to get it going. It might mean working with a different instrument — piano, for instance, instead of guitar — or starting with really basic chords. "The Easy Way" came out of doing the latter. Just one, four, and five until the one variation at the end of verses two and three.

I made up the story in the song. I think I wrote the lyrics pretty much in the order they are now, although I rewrote the third verse a few times.

I had not planned originally to include this song on Shake the World, but it started to feel like it belonged. "No one ever says there's too much love" is one of my themes for last year, I think. Just when we need more love, and action driven by love, an alarming number of people are on the anti-love side (usually while professing the opposite). And even though I wrote this song a few years ago, it feels even more true that we were foolish to think we could take the easy way.

I had doubled both acoustic and electric guitars, but the song started to feel too sweet, lacking edge, so I simplified the mix. The guitar solo is pretty conventional, but it's some of my better playing. The one guitar under the voice in the third verse is played with the capo way up high on the seventh fret. I love using a capo. It doesn't just let you change the key of a song. It lets you change how the guitar itself sounds.