Live, learn, leave
My album is done! I sent the master CD off to get duplicated this morning. In the tradition of obsessive bands like Boston or Steely Dan, this record was close to four years in the making, so I feel good about having reached this point. Soon it will be for sale on my web site and elsewhere. Meanwhile, here’s some images of the album cover, sleeve, etc. Enjoy!
Winding down a long busy stretch at work today with a big demo. Having nothing to do with that, here’s a new lyric idea for a song I will never record, mainly because it’s a mash up of all the drinkin’, smokin’ and drug takin’ allusions from every Steely Dan song I could think of. My friend John says “I bet that would have some wicked chord changes!” I suppose it might be fun to string together all the relevant samples and tack a sax solo onto the end.
Party At Dan’s
They got the booze they need
Libations that stagger the mind
She serves the smooth retsina
Drink kirschwasser from a shell
The Cuervo Gold
It’s grapefruit wine
Lucy still loves her coke and rum
The water will change to cherry wine
In the land of milk and honey
She drink the zombie from the cocoa shell
Drink your big black cow
And a Piña Colada my friend
Tobacco they grow in Peking
Show me the sparkle in you China
Smoking cobalt cigarettes
I take one last drag as I approach the stand
The fine Columbian
I was smokin’ with the boys upstairs
You were very high
We’re gonna break out the hats and hooters
Pull out the hardware let’s do it right
No I’m never gonna do it without the fez on
My friends say no don’t go for that cotton candy
But yours was kitchen clean
Would you care to explain?
It was forty eight hours ’till Lonnie came around
Close inspection fast revealed his favorite kind
Pick up what’s left by daylight
You know I’m through with Buzz
Here they are at long last. I’m happy to announce that the final masters for my record, Face the Heat, now complete. Many thanks to Erik Blicker and all at G&E Music. You can listen to the tracks here, but only for a limited time. Once I get CD’s made and for sale on CD Baby and the iTunes store, I’ll change the links to be just 30-second-ish samples.
Heat Wave – 5:31
Fine Red Wine – 4:47
Earthbound (I Wanna Fly) – 5:08
Who Can Fool Me – 3:19
Making Miles – 5:11
Touch the Ceiling – 6:30
Green Glove – 3:42
The Nine – 4:07
Angel Or Alien – 8:12
With the mastering for my album being almost done, I thought it was time to start thinking about the cover image. Last time around I made a drawing, but for this one I want to do something different. My current idea is to use some watercolor artwork by my kids. They’re very into watercolor painting and have come up with some that focus more on color on texture than representation and form. Lizzy in particular is in a sort of Jackson Pollack phase there days. I may use just one or may take a few and layer and recombine them in Photoshop. in any event the other night I scanned a bunch. We have a big set of closet doors in our downstairs which is an art wall, but it’s gotten pretty full. So I made them into a web gallery to share.
Jeannie and I saw the epic Canadian power trio Rush at Jones Beach Amphitheater last weekend. Rush is one of my all-time favorite bands and just about tied with the Grateful Dead for having seen them the most times. But last time I saw them was in 2004 or so, and before that it was many years. Rush are enjoying something of a revival these days, consolidating their legacy as it were, and touring in support of a (really good) documentary DVD about their career rather than an actual album.
Jones Beach is a really cool place to see a show. It’s situated right on the shore in a state park, with the stage out over the water. It was another super hot day, but as we crossed the bridge onto the island, the evening breeze was coming off the ocean and cooled everything down nicely. As the band started to play the moon rose over the stage. Very dramatic. After the concert Jeannie and I took a nice walk around the beach.
The show itself was great. Rush still have the chops and the energy to really deliver. Geddy Lee can hit those high notes, although didn’t do it as much. He sang a lot of parts lower and saved his voice for where it really mattered. They played two sets which spanned most of their career and included a bunch of newer stuff, and man they have a lot of records. I didn’t really know all of the tunes from the 90’s and 00’s. They played a bunch of brand-new songs from their forthcoming record, which sounded awesome. In particular “Caravan” had a lot of complex unison parts that evoked some of their earlier work. I think they tried to hit pretty much every record, but they skipped Fly By Night, Caress of Steel and Grace Under Pressure. This last one is one of my favorites, so that was a bit of a disappointment. Still, they played a lot of great material. Spirit of Radio, Freewill, 2112. Closer to the Heart included an excellent acoustic solo guitar intro.
They opened the second set with the whole of Moving Pictures, introduced by a spoof video of making a music video of “Moving Pitchers”. They were clearly having fun with it. Camera Eye was a definite high point; I’ve never seen them do that song live before. Encores included La Villa Strangiato, but with the first section played in a hockey-organ style, followed by a reggae version of Working Man. The walk-out music was a polka version of Closer to the Heart that would have done Weird Al proud. (The intermission music was Yes from Time and a Word.)
Rush music is fun to play as well as listen to. Back in college I did bunch of their songs in a band, playing synthesizers, including Subdivisions and YYZ. More recently I learned Xanadu and Cygnus X-1 on the bass, and now I’m learning Closer to the Heart on guitar.
If you’re not an origami person you’ll probably look at this and think “what a bunch of geeks”. But I know these people and find it pretty amusing. Jason Ku, Andrew Hudson, Robert Lang and Daniel Myer perform at the 5OSME (5th International Conference for Origami Science, Mathematics and Education) banquet in Singapore earlier this month.
My friend Lance von Erik and his partner Bon Von Schloss have formed a conceptual rock band. The concept is they write a new album of music in one rehearsal and perform it live and then never play it again. Here’s some video from the live performance of their second album, Bon Von II:
It really feels like summer now. It’s been a really hot week, up in the 90’s every day. Last Sunday was Father’s day and we spent a great day out at the beach swimming in the ocean. Earlier this week was the summer solstice. Yesterday was the kid’s last day of school, and both kids made the honor roll and now they’re on summer vacation. Now I have Ocean City on my mind, but there’s lots of adventures to get thru first.
It looks like one of the elm trees in our yard is sick. Maybe Dutch Elm disease. That’d be a bummer cuz we may have to cut it down to save the other one. At least it’s the lesser of the two elms, not the champion elm that I’ve grown particularly fond of is home to the family of squirrels that includes the red one with the black tail. The sick one is almost as huge and extends to over to our neighbor diagonally across the street. It’s very lopsided and I figured its destiny would be to fall over in a storm and take out 4 houses worth of power lines.
My office remains chaotic, although I’ve been productive and zen about the situation as things swirl around me. Viacom lost their big billion dollar lawsuit against Google – thrown out of court — so it’ll be interesting to see if there’s any fallout from that. My boss is in a bit of a funk over her deceased cat. I’m taking some time off over the next two weeks. A much needed break.
My recording project has progressed to the actual mastering, and Blick wired up a chain of external gear including a Weiss EQ and something called a BCL (Bass enhancer, Compressor, and Limiter). We rendered out the mixes without the final master effects (mainly dynamic compression) and ran them thru this chain instead. The difference was really striking. I’m really psyched. Blick is really getting into it. It seems he doesn’t get the chance to master full albums very much (mostly does promos and soundtracks fror TV shows) so he’s putting his full effort into it. His partner Glen dropped by and liked the sound. He dug Green Glove, saying it sounded just like Night Fly. Which I’m taking as a compliment, since it’s the most deliberately Steely track on the record.
After many attempts I successfully folded an origami zeppelin tonight. So I have one more nice new model for my exhibit this year. It also is the last word on the series of polar coordinate flying things that include my Rocketship, Hot Air Balloon and U.F.O.
When I was kid all squirrels were grey. Then one day we went up to visit my cousins in the suburbs outside of Toronto and we saw something new: a black squirrel. It turns it was a mutant strain, but a successful one, and over the years the black squirrels have spread out across the northeastern part of North America, to the point where now in the 21st century, they are common in Westchester County, NY. We have a champion elm tree in our front yard, and in it lives a family of squirrels. One Saturday morning a few weekends ago I was sitting on the couch sipping my morning coffee when the new family of young squirrels came out to play. I called the kids over and they were knocked out by overwhelming cuteness of all those squirrels frolicking in the trees, on the power lines and on the ground. I counted nine of them, some black and some grey. Then I saw something new I’d never seen before: a black squirrel with a red tail!
I was out rollerblading earlier this week and I saw another one. That’s two. I wonder if this a new variety of squirrels, and if it’s going to become common in a few years.
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Last Friday was Lizzy’s spring band concert. I’m happy to say that the school band is getting a lot better and Lizzy in particular is sounding quite good. This is important to me as a parent and musician, because school band was a big part of my early musical training and experience. Two years ago (Lizzy’s first year in the band) the teacher quit at the end of the year, and about half the band graduated the school. So last year it was a new teacher and a ragtag group of beginners. So as you might imagine, they sounded pretty rough. But the teacher, Mr. Quinn, was quite dedicated and patient, and the kids have been steadily improving. This year was a dramatic both in terms of the material they could handle and the level at which they played it. This year they did a dress rehearsal at the school, which by all accounts was a big success and instrumental in recruiting new kids into the band.
Lizzy had a solo too, the Hunter’s Chorus by Weber, and I’m happy to say she nailed it. And at the end of the concert the band director told me he’s inviting Lizzy to join the honor band next spring. This is a band formed from the best players from a bunch of schools in the area. It’s made up kids in grades 6 – 8, and Lizzy is just going into 6th grade next fall, so that’s pretty cool.
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This is the time of year when the evenings are really long. This kids are all excited about summer vacation and me, well, I have a couple long weekends coming up. Lizzy had the end of her gymnastics class last weekend, complete with a demo competition. It’s something she’s been working to master, so one night this week she was out on the lawn doing cartwheels back handsprings and asking me to spot her. Michelle was out too and as it started getting dark the fireflies came out. Firefly season is always special since it’s so short and only comes when the evenings are long. The kids caught a bunch of fireflies and but them in a jar, although I persuaded them to release our little glowing friends when it was time to go inside. It was a nice shiny moment of serenity.
I’ve been doing software development for my friend Erik for a while now. It’s been going well, but I’m sort of bound by time constraints (I have a day job and kids, as well as commitments to developing my art in music and origami) and he’s been budget bound (small business owner). We worked out an arrangement to trade studio time for software development, but since my record is nearly done so is that deal. Erik had the idea to begin outsourcing the development, which would put me in the role of architect/designer/team lead and (potentially/hypothetically) triple our output as far as software dev productivity goes.
As a prerequisite to sharing the code, we needed to get the project under source control. I remember a few months back my friend Nick blogging about how to set up a GIT server. I thought this might be something I could do, but what a time suck and a hassle. As it turns out Erik is a big believer in the whole software-as-service thing. He’s using a service (odesk.com) to line up offshore developers, and he’s even trying to convince to use a service to help on my next album.
The thing is, he’s not really into my drum sounds, which is not too surprising, since they’re all redended MIDI parts, jammed using the four-finger method and/or step recorded by yours truly. They sound a heck of a lot better than say They Might Be Giants, who used a similar technique back in the day, but fall short of a really good real drummer. And the cymbals in particular are a bit thin samplewise. So Erik is like, “Man, somewhere out there is a drummer who’s just killer, who will nail your tracks and bring a whole new level of energy. You send him a file of your song, and he’ll send you back an amazing drum part.” And this really sounds not far from the truth. I’ve had good experiences collaborating over the net with my brother to create our last album, and on this album with my friend John, who’s just recently hung out a shingle to do mastering as a service over the internet.
As to the question of source control, Erik had a friend who turned us onto source-control-as-a-service at cvsdude.com, a.k.a Codesion. The cost is pretty low — on the level of your basic web hosting service, and they have an admin interface to let you set up source repositories, bug/feature tracking, and to add users and set access control. Totally worth it as far as the time it saved for me not having to do all that by hand. I was able to fairly quickly create a repository, upload the source, and set up version control in my IDE on another machine to confirm it works as advertised, then checkout the source, make some changes and commit the new version. So it’s all humming along quite nicely.
Of course the project up to now has just been living on my local machine, so there’s a whole cycle of organization, cleanup and documentation ahead before some third party developer can jump in. And the other thing is, before y’all get all drooling over the idea that the day of software-as-a-service has really arrived, Codesion is still just another scrappy startup trying to get by like the rest of us. At first I was taken in by their slick web interface and their more-human-than-human support/sales bot, but the illusion was soon shattered. I had signed up for a trial account to see if they were legit, and then Erik went ahead and creates a permanent account. The problem is, for some reason (like a flaw in their database design) they don’t’ allow the same email address on two different accounts, so every time I tried to log in I got an error and a nastygram from their server to my inbox. Their tech support cleared it up by nerfing my trial account, but this is disappointing because at some point I’d like to get the Foldinator under version control, but I don’t want to get a new email address just to appease these guys.