Update: selected Monkey Typing Pool noises are available at Bandcamp. Everything is freely streamable, with downloads at any price you care to pay (including nothing at all).
Many of the links below, while the text and descriptions are available, feature dead links to the songs. Not everything will be up at Bandcamp (like: songs with uncleared samples…) but over time, revamped versions (and of course, new stuff) will find its home there.
The List of Songs
“Now and Then” (Beatles cover, as if done in 1967—blather plus link) (direct link)
“Monkey Typing Pool” (2023 version)
“I Stood Still”
“Reception”
“No Social Security”
—the Hits from an Old Notebook ep (Bandcamp/Blog entry)
As the EP title suggests, these are all rather elderly songs, at least in their origins. The newest of them, “Monkey Typing Pool” (the song), dates in its first recording from 2005. The other three are indeed from an old notebook going a-way, way back: let’s put it this way—if it sounds to you like “No Social Security” is a parody of Elvis Costello & the Attractions circa This Year’s Model and that “I Stood Still” bears the marks of someone who listened to Sound Affects and Setting Sons quite a bit…you’re not wrong, and that listener wasn’t being nostalgic.
On a more serious note: I dedicate this EP to my father, Chuck Norman, who passed away during the time these songs were recorded. He always supported me in whatever I felt I wanted to do (and even lent his basement to my younger brother’s early bands, which my brother christened Catbox Studios for reasons that should be pretty clear…). Thanks, Dad.
“Contrafact” (Bandcamp / Blog entry)
As befits the title, this is a sort of conceptual rewrite of another song. I borrowed the chords from parts of my version of “God Bless the Child” (see below), and wrote the lyrics based on paraphrasing ideas from that song’s lyrics.
“The Singing Train” (Bandcamp / Blog entry)
Very b-side, in that the track is an experiment in creating a track on which I did not play a single note. Most of the musical material was generated from the sound of a video I took some years back of a screeching train. I also used samples of helicopters, duct tape, scissors, and a few other things. I cheated a little bit…in that I did “play” the melody lines of the vocoder vocal parts.
“Doubtful Sound” (Armoires cover) (2023 reworking—from The Sugar of Lead Technology EP) Bandcamp / Blog entry).
Thanks to Rex Broome for writing this excellent song and letting me post this cover of it. I found the song itself inspiring to sing.
“Lance Crocker, Almanac Cracker” (2023 reworking—from The Sugar of Lead Technology EP) Bandcamp / Blog entry).
Voided by gooses.
“God Bless the Child” (2023 reworking—from The Sugar of Lead Technology EP) Bandcamp / Blog entry).
Yes, the Billie Holiday classic—no new noises here, just extensively remixed and otherwise run through the Digital Fuctwithizer(tm).
“Study Rain” (2023 remake—from The Sugar of Lead Technology EP) Bandcamp / Blog entry, in excruciating detail.
First Monkey Typing Pool song with original (non-collaged) noises…and I’ve been wanting to redo it since I did it the first time, in 2005. I finally have.
“Dear Very” (2023) Bandcamp Blog entry
The chords for this song have been in my head for decades. The basic notion of the song too—essentially, getting past the end of a relationship. (Those of you who know me, and how long I’ve been with my wife Rose, will realize just how freakin’ old the bones of this song is…) Anyway: originally, I was thinking this would turn out sounding kinda like Tom Verlaine’s “Without a Word” (from which I stole two chords)…but it didn’t turn out that way at all. Unusually for me, the way this one ended up sounding is not what I’d anticipated. (The b-side is an updated version of “Victorian Photographs,” see which below.)
“Stephin Merritt Writes Another Song About the Moon” (original blog entry: song revised 2022)
I went back to the original audio files I created way back when and remixed them, altering a few tiny details but mostly just making a much better mix. Some vocal tweaks…and the ending effect is slightly different. This track on Bandcamp.
“Little Audio Sparkler and the Slightly Scary Gentlemen of Rock”
Another older track whose newer version is mostly a matter of remixing and minor rhythmic corrections. This one has lyrics written (90%) by Brian Block. This track on Bandcamp.
“(Here’s One I Bet You Wouldn’t Want to Meet) In the Wild”
I upgraded the original recording from [year redacted] by adding “drums” and “bass” and backing vocals, altering the tempo slightly, fine-tuning some pitch and rhythm issues, and Judasizing the acoustic guitar parts. This track on Bandcamp.
The idea of setting the vocals to “Doctor Robert” on top of the bed of “Flying” occurred to me…so I made it happen.
Can Halen “Pinchin’ with the Devil“
Can vs. David Lee Roth…
Synths are percussion instruments. So is a bass. This track on Bandcamp.
Remake/remodel. This track on Bandcamp.
“Brenda’s Car” (and acoustic version)
Two-sided—no, three-sided!—Monkey Typing Pool “single” along with “Pretty at Night”… This track on Bandcamp.
Cleverly, you’ve already figured out this is the other side of “Brenda’s Car.” This track on Bandcamp.
“Creatures of Light” [Robyn Hitchcock cover, 2022 remix]
Corrected as many tempo weirdnesses as possible, re-comped the vocal from the existing 2008 raw tracks, and made a new, much-improved mix
“The Dead Bob Dylan” [2022 remix with new bass]
Just as it says, I redid this one, correcting a few errant rhythms and such in the tracks recorded in 2013, adding a bassline, and remixing the whole thing. This track on Bandcamp.
This song’s been around in some form or another for a very long time. I did an extremely primitive recording of it back when years began with 1-9 that had just acoustic guitar and two vocal tracks (and lacked the instrumental interlude in the middle). Over time I came up with various ideas for arranging it—and eventually, it became technologically if not musically possible for me to realize that. Suburban ostranenie… This track on Bandcamp.
“Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except for Me and My Money”
Came up with the title…as sometimes happens, I then felt compelled to write the song. I wanted to see if I could do all that in one day—I couldn’t, but I did do it in three days. This is the Bandcamp link (and this is the link to the “silver lamé” version)—and here are the lyrics:
lyrics:
Let me tell you how it will be
All of you is microdecimals of me
I am your alphabet, your omegavitamin
All your base are belong the golden site I’m inDare to tell me what you want me to hear
Stuff my gullet with interest, if I lend an ear
Weigh and measure, see where the marketvane leads
Flow to my treasury, compounding interest breedsIf a tree falls in a forest and it’s unmonetized…
What’s the sound of one hand clapping…if it’s cash-shy?
Your value’s like a cat in a Schrödinger cage
You only live or die depending on the whim of my gazeYou wanna take but you can’t take until I
Deign to make and bake an allofit pie
One slice for me and—no slice for you
Maybe after you’re dead, we’ll melt your bones into glueIf a tree falls…
If a tree falls…
If a tree falls…
If all the trees fall…
(Here comes the woodchipper!)
*
So, a while back, I was putting together a mix…and I couldn’t remember off the top of my head whether a particular song called “Days” was a cover of the Television song or of the Kinks song. That struck me as odd…but then, the two songs are in similar keys, fairly close in tempo, and…well, not really about the same thing, yet many lines seem to work in both contexts.
So I decided to come up with a cover version that incorporated elements of both songs. The basic arrangement is from the Television song…but several elements are borrowed from the Kinks song. The ascending bassline in the last 2 beats of every other measure during the verses is the same melody as “I’m thinking of the days…” and the little lead guitar figure at the ends of verses is a variation on “I’ll remember all my life.” And of course, I sing some of the words and a version of the melody of the Kinks song on the chorus…and borrow the bridge, wholesale, from the Kinks. There are also some backing vocals borrowed from the Kinks song.
(I also made an “acoustic” mix sans drums, bass, and backing vocals but with the piano more prominent in the mix.)
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“Alchemic Neurotic/The Pelican Directory”
SSHHHH!!! IT’S A SECRET!
Is it bassackwards to come up with a band name, then a genre, then two songs? And then to construct an entire fake-band biography, based on scattering one’s own biographical info among band members and adding details based entirely on your impression of the guys in old photos of hippies that you pasted together to form the “band” personnel? And then, of course, to blatantly steal era-appropriate (and a few era-inappropriate) bits to cobble the songs together with? It’s witchcraft!
Musical ideas and homages and thieveries from (sort of in order) The Who, Plasticland (yes, that seems second-hand…but it’s a specific chord voicing that they didn’t borrow but I did…), Wire, a Hitchcock movie, Yes (two different ideas…one sort of leading me, mentally, to the other…), the Move…The Beatles, the Velvet Underground, XTC, Nico and John Cale, Robyn Hitchcock…
Seriously: I found it freeing to write near-complete nonsense, then deliver it as if it really meant something. The words exist solely to point at a mood, and to rhyme and scan and throw sound sparks around the room. The title phrase of the a-side was originally “Hellenic Neurotic,” because someone in a Facebook group I belong to described herself that way…and I liked the sound. Changed it…because outside of context, the “Hellenic” part either misled or irked. It left its traces though…in the pseudo-bouzouki lick at the top of the song.
Also fun to discover that a chord sequence that seemed near random as it sort of stumbled its way into my head proved, in fact, capable of containing a near-identical inner voice to the chord sequence preceding it which I’d come up with based on a sort of obvious chromatic logic. Ending up surprising myself, myself, is always fun!
Bandcamp links: “Alchemic Neurotic” and “The Pelican Directory”
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“One Hundred Years (You Can’t Do)”
A friend offhandedly said something like “I wonder what the Cure’s ‘One Hundred Years’ would sound like if it were done like something from A Hard Day’s Night…” So, uh, well…this is apparently the sort of thing that makes me respond with the musical equivalent of “Hold my beer…”—and I was off.
Since, in theory, it’s 1964, there is a mono mix…and also a bizarre stereo mix similar to the weird ideas found in early stereo mixes of Beatles records, among others. I’m talking about the actual stereo mixes, not Capitol’s “electronically reprocessed stereo” effect. (Song links at the blog entry linked above.)
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“Jesus Christ, It’s Rex’s 50th!“
Ten years ago, my friend Rex completed an astonishing project: every day, for a year leading up to his 40th birthday, Rex uploaded a cover of a different song. He often involved family members and, eventually, friends: I collaborated on a few of them and covered one of Rex’s own songs as a “bonus” birthday gift.
Now, ten years later, of course Rex is turning 50…but in the interim, he and his business/musical partner Christina are a couple years into a very successful record label/community called Big Stir. So…I thought I’d give Rex a 50th birthday gift by trying to do, just once, what he did 365 times: complete a recording of a cover song in a single day. So here’s a slightly abbreviated cover of the Big Star classic, “Jesus Christ.”
It helped that I chose a song very familiar to me, and a very simple song. After that, the arrangement was all in my head…and the lyrics were rewritten to mark the occasion, with several in-jokes incorporated…
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In summer of 2020, I hadn’t done any recording for quite some time. An e-mail acquaintance, someone I’d known slightly online for a couple of decades, posted in the Robyn Hitchcock Facebook group (one of them) that there was a new project being planned: the idea was that a bunch of musicians on the list (ranging from complete pros with several record releases to home recordists such as myself) would sign up, and then be paired with another project member: each would write a song and demo it for someone else to do, and be given a song written by a different project member to cover. I was cajoled into participating—while I begged off at first, said cajoling had its effect, and I somewhat reluctantly agreed. “Somewhat reluctantly” because, as I said, I’d been AWOL from the recording front for quite some time. (The project is still happening—I hope it eventually happens in its complete form. The song I’m to cover has not yet arrived…)
I am so grateful for this opportunity— because it kicked me in the butt, and the recent spate of productivity here can be credited to it. (Or blamed on it: your choice.)
Anyway, I started messing around with some ideas—and for reasons explained in the blog post, decided to write a very Beatlesque little number. The title phrase and much of the chorus melody sort of appeared fully formed (first few lines, just the descending bit), and a bit of playing around on the keyboard yielded the weird turnaround. Because the chorus was characterized by that ever-flowing keyboard part (obviously inspired by “I Am the Walrus”), I wanted to do something contrasting for the verse. This is where the bass rhythm dropping out, nearly in a reggae-ish style, came from.
The lyrics developed fairly quickly, once I sort of figured out what the title phrase might possibly mean…and I think the key moment was writing in character, and deciding to Embrace The Snark. That decision quite possibly led my brain to the verse melody…which reminds me now of something Andy Partridge might have done (albeit when his vocals bore more resemblance to, as he described it, a “seal bark”). Ideas re self-delusion and buying into bad advice, along with various alleged narratives of Darwin Award -winning misuses of GPS systems, led to the bridge. Probably it was the “driving” idea that reminded me of nuclear scientist J. Frank Parnell’s lines which form the countermelody (it’s what he says just before hapless punk Archie opens the trunk of the Malibu…with unfortunate results for him).
The demo was nearly waylaid when I discovered that the mic (or its interface with my computer) I’d been using for years was not working. In a pinch, I recorded the demo version of the vocals using my iMac’s built-in mic. Sound quality was dubious, of course…so I processed it to sound vaguely transistor-radio-with-echo. The keyboards, bass, and “guitar” carried over from the demo—everything else was added on top of that (and the vocals rerecorded—actually at 90% speed and then sped up because I was stealing tricks from old Beatles records). Obviously the freaky psychedelic coda is straight outta Strawberry Fields… This track on Bandcamp.
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Lyrics-by-Wikipedia addressing a game involving the curious fact of there being several semi-famous Enos—music obviously leaning primarily on the best-known one (although I sort of tried to have some Spoon-like touches in there as well, re Jim Eno, their drummer and a fairly well-known producer). This track on Bandcamp.
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Because—just like “The Yellow Rose of Texas” and the poems of Emily Dickinson—the lyrics to King Crimson’s “21st Century Schizoid Man” fit perfectly atop the music of the Beach Boys’ “Cabin Essence.”
Fake harps and flutes and glockenspiel and piano cement the association. Crow cries uncover paranoia’s poison door here.
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My friend Brian Block occasionally amuses himself by using online AI engines to create various texts. At one point, he fed in the lyrics to one of 2020’s Biggest Hit Songs…and what was interesting was how little the results resembled the original lyrics. As I was reading the AI double mistranslations, a few lines struck me as quite reminiscent of the sort of lyrics One Of My Favorite Bands Of The Last Two Decades might write. And as I kept reading, more lines struck me similarly.
You can guess, right? I decided to organize and rewrite the lines that reminded me of OOMFBOTL2D and do a song in the style of OOMF…(as their fans refer to them).
Normally, I’m not coy about influences…but for whatever reason, I’m leaving the identity of both hit song and fave band as an exercise for the listener.
Here are some details about the song’s writing and recording. And here are some outtakes: the full “ghost piano” thing that you hear bits of at the end, and an idea I never thought I was really going to use (a small snippet, reversed, opens the song): “two (plus one) slightly (loudly) distorted (faux) guitars” improvising wildly for about 90 seconds.
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“Harrier“
In the mid-eighties, one of the songs the re-formed Wire did was called “Harry Houdini.” It was released only once, years later on one of Wire’s “Legal Bootlegs” series. They evidently didn’t think much of it, and never finished it.
For some reason, I liked it. And decided it would be fun to finish it, more or less as it might have been done in that era. I rewrote the bassline—and, since I couldn’t make out the lyrics and since Wire lyrics evolve anyway, mostly rewrote them. I ended up having the guitar parts be entirely sampled from other Wire songs.
I also ended up doing two abstract, dissonant instrumentals based on material I developed while making the track…and then also decided that while the song’s lengthy coda that introduced that material was kinda interesting, it was slightly specialized in interest…so I made a “single” version (the “Polite” mix: linked above) as well…
Details here. Many more details (on the new lyrics) here.
Direct link to: (1) the original long version of the song; (2) “Harrier (Celltab Dekonstrukt Mix I)“; (3) “Harrier (Celltab Dekonstrukt Mix II)“: the first “Dekonstrukt Mix” is uglier than the second one. Or maybe the other way around. I’m not sure.
(Update April 2023: I have remixed the “song” portion of this—I think elements are clearer now, and over time I’ve become less convinced by the “noisy” versions. So this is my new preferred version: “Harrier” [Polite and Spotless mix].
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It occurred to me that as inspired as the recitation of cat poetry by a four-year-old might be, some people might better appreciate the track in its entirely instrumental version. And thus it has come to pass.
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“St. Elmo’s the One You’re With”
Inspired by this mashup – whose idea is brilliant but whose execution just didn’t work for me – here’s Brian Eno making nice with Stephen Stills. I wonder if Eno knew, or planned, that the two songs’ chords are identical… (Yes…nothing here for more than two years, and Eno rears his head again. I’d kind of like to do more but…busy!)
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Fake Brian Eno
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This is the original version (redubbed and altered years later).
He’s not dead yet. A song that somehow arose from a poorly designed concert ad.
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“Cats in the Creeper Universe”
A co-write with a four-year-old.
The internet’s a funny place.
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“Can You Take Me Back” (Beatles cover)
Barely a song, but…in compiling collections of covers of every song on every Beatles album, in order, I realized that so far as I can tell, no one covered the fragment between “Cry Baby Cry” and “Revolution 9,” known as “Can You Take Me Back.” So I did.
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“Doubtful Sound”: cover of Skates & Rays song, as gift to Rex Broome at the completion of his “39-40” project (slightly modified from the first version to remove Cale-based in-jokes).
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“This Is Radio 39-40” (“cover” collage inspired by “This Is Radio Etienne” by Saint Etienne – for Rex Broome’s “39-40” blog).
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“Grasses Are Longer Than Hair” (sound collage inspired by “Revolution 9” – credited to Celltab (Celltab: For Abstraction™)
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“1 2 RemiXmas U” (Wire cover, more or less – remixed October 2010)
A Christmas version of the Wire classic. Note that it somehow seemed in line with the aesthetics of Wire Mk. III that each distinct musical event in this song – each guitar chord or note, each bass note – is a clone of the same event. That is, every F# chord is the same F# chord, digitally duplicated; every B in the bass is the same B on the keyboard, digitally duplicated, etc. The drum part is from the beginning of Wire’s “Fragile,” sped up to this song’s 240 bpm by the simple expedient of chopping every beat down to scale. If the time between one hit and the next is an eighth note, for example, I simply cut out everything in the first hit after 0.125 seconds (at 240 bpm, conveniently, every 4/4 measure takes exactly 1 second – so “eighth notes” truly are one-eighth of a second). This gives the sound both an organic quality – it’s a real drum hit, after all – and that digital frisson, since it’s cut off electronically. Nearly every sound in the recording (drums included) is massively compressed, then hard-limited, and often overdriven as well. Play loud – it’s Christmas! (Oh – plus…sleighbells!)
lyrics:
Saw you in a mall (asking for sacks), sat on a lap – sat on the fat man
Caught you with a package (wrapper), caught you with a package
1 2 Xmas U
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“God Bless the Child” (Billie Holiday cover – recorded May/June 2010)
“Commissioned” as part of Rex Broome’s “39-40” covers project: there are two versions. I provided Rex with the tracks for drums, bass, two guitars, and lead vocals, and he added some parts. While he was doing that, I had other ideas and created my own version (mostly by adding an organ solo).
direct link (to my solo version)
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“Victorian Photographs (Still Streets Remix)” (February 2008)
I’d always liked the sound of the highly altered guitar track here – I can’t quite remember how I managed to get an acoustic guitar to sound like that – but I wanted to do something with it. What I ended up doing was cutting up the vocal track into syllables and layering them into chords, one chord per phrase, then further messing with those chords using various echoes, reverbs, and filters. Near the end of the track, I built a chord made from every damned syllable I sang in the whole song (uh, except one or two expressive little non-pitched grunts). The ending is partially accidental: to complement the distortion of the voice chords on the second verse, I took the ambient guitar part, doubled it, and raised one by 5 cents and lowered the other by 5 cents from true pitch. What resulted was that curious little whistling part you can hear in the long fade – and the bandpass swoop I added was intended to emphasize that a bit more.
direct link
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“Victorian Photographs” (December 2007) (2023 update: Bandcamp Blog entry)
lyrics:
If I look at you long enough,
you will disappear
like ghosts in Victorian photographs,
evaporated
into the light
of still streets.(Leaves fall)
Retracing names of prior occupants
(Hotel Aramon)
on a pad of hotel stationery,
(October 19)
engraved, laid paper memorial,
(Room 121)
note to no one, signed, someone’s sincerely…The kitchen clock had stopped again –
or time had stopped instead,
and all my moments were second-hand,
replayed, rewound:
Would I restart,
or stay here, now?
Musical turbogeekery: at one point, I was considering chopping up and reversing the solo to use as chaotic backdrop near the ending (I decided I didn’t need it) – but I wanted the notes to be in key with the backdrop. Since other parts of the solo are on different chords, I went through the solo and determined what scale I was using at any given point. And I discovered that, quite unconsciously, the song had a “secret” circle-of-fifths chord structure (a classic example of the way composition should precede analysis, not the other way around). The first part of the solo uses an A major scale, until the introduction of a G major chord introduces a G natural – and from that point until the C major chord a few meausures later, the solo uses a D major scale. That C major chord, though, isn’t the tonic, as the associated scale retains an F#: in fact, the actual modulation is to G major (actually E minor). Finally, the odd suspended chord that the song rests on for several bars builds on an F major chord – but again, it’s not the tonic (if I were going to say anything is at that point, it’d be A minor). The scale here is C major. So, the following sequence of scales is used: A, D, G, and C…moving downwards by a fifth each time. When I put the chord sequence together, I did it by dead reckoning: what sound do I want here? There are some parallelisms: the A major to F# minor is echoed in reverse by the movement from G major to B minor, and the half-step move from F# minor to G major is mirrored by the half-step move from B minor to C major in the next phrase (giving us two similar phrases: A-F#m-G, G-Bm-C. That half-step gambit is reprised in the movement from E minor to F major, in the last sequence of the verse.
Even curioser: that movement of progressive flattening occurs in this song’s earlier counterpart (I’ve always sort of thought of them as a pair – a pair of opposites, perhaps…), “Oslo Also” (see below). In that song, the progressive flattening occurs first in the introduction of the D major chord at the end of the chorus’s second phrase (we’re in E major), second by the introduction of the alternate voicing of that D chord (a C-shaped chord that leaves the G and E strings open; thus: D-F#-G-D-E). The first time, with a more standard voicing of the D chord, the “string” part passes through a G sharp (native to E major); I realized that I had to change that to a G natural the second time through because of the C-shaped D polychord. (By the way: I haven’t been able to find a name for the somewhat common chord voicing involving the simultaneous sounding of usually adjacent major third and fourth. This chord is organic on a guitar: there are many versions of it, but the basic idea involves moving a common chord shape but leaving surrounding strings open rather than barre-ing them. I don’t think I’ve heard the chord much prior to music from the late sixties or so. Steely Dan fans follow the band’s joking cue to refer to a chord with an added second as a “mu” chord; but I haven’t been able to find a name for this added-fourth chord. And “added-fourth chord” is boring.)
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“Are ‘Higsons’ Electric?” (Segway Army) (November 2007)
A mashup of Robyn Hitchcock’s “Listening to the Higsons” (studio version) and Gary Numan and Tubeway Army’s “Are ‘Friends’ Electric?”…with some chatter taken from Hitchcock’s November 2004 appearance at Shank Hall.
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“Oslo Also” (September 2007) [original version—no longer available]
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“Beyond the Valley of Lolita Nation” (July 2006)
A collage of sounds entirely from Game Theory and Loud Family recordings, in the style of the Residents’ “Beyond the Valley of a Day in the Life.”
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“Lance Crocker, Almanac Cracker” (June 2006)
lyrics:
He rides a donkey
through the city –
He wears trousers
’cause his knees aren’t so pretty –in swerving traffic,
past oil derricks,
under bridges
to his Uncle Eric’s (yeah!).He carries compasses
in leather satchels,
in canvas, corduroy…
and smells of burning matches –a switchblade ego,
a turnpike mind,
an appled oranger
spilling coffee grounds and rinds.(He’s…)
Lance Crocker
Lance Crocker
Lance Crocker
Almanac cracker!
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“Monkey Typing Pool” (September 2005)
direct link
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Well. It’s finally done. More than a year ago, I ran into an intriguing spam alt-text that reminded me, more than a little, of early R.E.M. lyrics. I decided to work with them and turn them into early R.E.M.-like lyrics (original version here). At that time, I said something like, now all I have to do is write an early R.E.M. song to go with the lyrics. Around the same time, I’d bought a keyboard, with the idea that I’d get my playing skills back up and possibly record some things. A bit of an uphill battle, since I’d never recorded anything, really. The music was almost completely assembled in my head before I got some of the necessary equipment (a USB/audio MIDI interface, a decent mic), and then I had to learn how to use the damned things. (Gigantic, enormous thanks to Roger Winston for advice here, and to Bradley Skaught and glenn mcdonald for advice they didn’t necessarily know they were offering – they bear none of the blame for how this turned out, though.)
The lyrics, almost from the moment I started assembling and writing them, had a clear focus that I didn’t want to overclarify (as I said back then, at the link above, that would turn them from early R.E.M. lyrics to later R.E.M. lyrics). All I’ll say on that is, they’re about the events of the last four and a half years (with one historical reference to a related event about fourteen years ago), and I’m not happy at all about those events.
My main musical challenge was that I’d never really thought much about how drums work before, so I spent a lot of time listening to drum tracks (early Bill Berry most prominently), watching drummers, and trying to figure out how to make a drum part sound more or less organic (i.e., playable by a single human with the standard complement of limbs).
I also needed to upgrade my computer (something I’d wanted to do anyway) – only to discover that, no, I couldn’t hook it up directly to the keyboard (I told you, I didn’t know the first thing about MIDI) and record noise (thus the need for the Tascam US-122). I ended up cheating a bit: rather than composing, arranging, and editing a bunch of MIDI parts together – which was more MIDI than I felt I could deal with at once, including the notion that I’d inadvertently delete months of work – as soon as individual tracks were done, I recorded them as .wav files and (being more familiar with how to edit those) arranged and edited those. On the one hand, this might have given a slightly more “human”-sounding, slightly less perfect feel to the whole thing (even though the basic rhythm tracks are locked into a beat – except for one part of the song that I slowed down slightly) – on the other, I’m sure that it probably caused me more grief in the end…not least when I did in fact lose months of work, by somehow both deleting a bunch of files on the computer and losing the backup disc I’d burned. (This was, probably not coincidentally, after my first attempt to record the vocal tracks: I think I must have narcoleptically turned into a self-sabotaging evil twin.) Fortunately, I’d at that point mixed down a complete instrumental track – so even though I was hampered in being unable to alter that mix, I didn’t have to start from scratch.
So, here’s my imitation early R.E.M. song (although oddly, it was apparently done on a day when all the guitars were locked in a room that everyone was too drunk to remember where the keys were). Pretend you’re hearing real instruments.
lyrics:
Annotate the capstone and prepare three days' walk milk scattered cows Sign your name on the shattered Signify…to the water Cart before swept behind Testify…to the ground March to grotto Barrel a peck and banjo fence the sugar of lead technology refines Who needs calamine? Air to blur and settle Chimney-pots Understate the and slate removed frequency Depth and volume define Who will beat the drum? I can study rain Testified to the puma Understate… I saw Montgomery wince Under the old… Nail the wind to the water Under the old state… Tie the flame to the ground Who? Whose face on the coin the ransom bought? Civil twilight resent the shadows Counterfeit the dictionary Bury armies — harvest fountains
direct link [to be added in future when song is revised/redone]
Gear, Etc.
Yamaha DGX-202
Tascam US-122
Shure SM-57
The Larynx of Horror
GoldWave
Audacity
Nero Wave Editor
Multiquence
LAME (for the mp3)
Recorded from about March 2005 through June 2005 in the terrible, deeply evil Cat Exclusion Facility
There’s one sample – try to find it
“Tinsnip Idol Mandate” (July 2004)
*
“Breakfast” (3217 BCE)
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All everything by Jeff Norman, except as noted.
The Architectural Dance Society 
