As I am sitting here emailing, doing the back-end office-y crap, plodding through booking, promo and other soulless pursuits of the like, Shawn is getting acquainted with my loop pedal* for the first time and it’s BRILLIANT. When I heard what was going on, I just had to record it. With Shawn’s blessing, I relay it to the internets… I could space out and listen to this all day, every day… so many amazing ideas tumbling out…
I LOATHE looping but I always had a knack for it, coming from a jazz-guitar background, playing lead guitar in bands for years and ultimately winding up doing a one-man show many nights a week, so I’ve done plenty of it. To me, there’s nothing worse than hearing a singer-songwriter pile on schlubby layers of beat-boxing, ‘percussive’ acoustic guitar over a 2 chord vamp and rap about how the current political climate isn’t influenced enough by love then segue into an OAR song. Now, I’m not hatin’ on looping-funky-acoustic singer-songwriters, I’m just sayin’… uh…nope, yes I am.
It’s very much a love/hate relationship, as I find I have with most improv-based music; what makes it unique is that a song is being pulled from thin air but all too often, after all is said and done, it’s still just thin air.
I think I might be re-entering a ‘love’ phase of looping after hearing what Shawn did right out the gate…
Here are a few of my favorite current improvising and/or looping artists/albums:
Owen Pallett/Final Fantasy – He Poos Clouds is great.
Andrew Bird – “Mysterious Production of Eggs”, a killer classic album.
Medeski Martin & Wood – “Tonic”, “Shack-Man”, “Combustication” are favs.
John Scofield – The album ‘Agogo’ with MMW, especially.
Delaney Davidson – a friend made at the Steel Bridge Songfest, especially love his new record, “Self Decapitation”, a portal to a backwoods exorcism cast in the Great Depression.
Jared Denton Jones – a long-time friend of mine and amazing artist, haunting, ethereal, ambient
and a recent Madison discovery, The Weather Duo
and now….introducing… Shawn Drake!
whoops, I didn’t have time to spend writing this… back to work!
* perhaps the greatest gift to the bastardized genre of loop-based music, the Line 6 DL 4, delay modeler and looper or the ‘green box’ as it’s mostly commonly referred to.
Holy Guacamole! Bella Union just posted Heidi’s video of “Show to Show” on their blog… Yowser… Heidi and I became BFF at the “Edgar Allen Polka” songwriter’s week up in Sturgeon Bay at the Holiday Motel and sung this tune together. She’s got PIPES!
Bella Union has released albums from Andrew Bird, The Dirty Three, Explosions in the Sky, Fleet Foxes… to name [drop] a few. I’m printing this out to put on the fridge. I am so awesome. I might be the most awesome person ever born.
Here’s the link:
http://bellaunionrecords.blogspot.com/2010/01/amazing-song-and-video-by-jeremiah.html
Here’s a clip of Shawn and I doing a new song called “Bad Love” on The Urban Theater.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XWlr1wY9KhY&feature=player_embedded
Well, the audio on this blog is down for the time being. I’m not sure what happened. It was all strung together with free online storage type sites so it might very well have been consumed by advertisements. For now, if you’d like to hear some tunes, I’ve got a handful at these sites:
http://www.reverbnation.com/jeremiahnelson
http://www.myspace.com/jeremiahnelsonmusic
…don’t know what I did but the audio works again. This calls for a celebration.
I feel like Brad said it most eloquently, “Every year several songwriters from all over the country journey by car, plane or bus to meet at a secluded Wisconsin cabin, located on Lake Michigan. They spend an entire week playing their favorite songs, collaborating on new songs and often ending each night with a race to the bottom of a Jameson bottle. This special performance brings many of these songwriters together to share the spoils of their creative week. Brianna Lane (Minneapolis, MN), Jeremiah Nelson (Madison, WI), Brooks West (Nashville, TN) and Brad Hoshaw (Omaha, NE) will perform “in the round” for an intimate night of stories and songs. ”
All in all, it was one of the most productive weeks I’ve ever had. I ended walking away with a handful of new tunes, all co-writes, that I feel really proud of. I’m going to post the demos as I am able. One of them is even going to be on the new Achilles Heel recording we are starting this week and another will be on the new John Statz album we just started.
Now we are taking the show on the road, doing 2 shows:
12/3/09 @ Kitty Kat Club Minneapolis, 12/5/09 @ Slowdown Omaha
Here’s a demo of a track called “Nothing to Lose” that was finished that week:
If you are viewing this facebook, you’ll have to follow this link to hear the audio: http://jeremiahnelson.net
It took a while to put this one together but I think it turned out kinda cool. Lately I’ve noticed the glaring similarities between this line of work and the life of a traveling salesman… recorded in room 123 at the Holiday Music Motel…
Heidi Spencer sings on the track and made this awesome video:
here are the words
________
i guess i’m lost on the trail, thought i knew what i was after but i’m just swinging in the air
are we better off aimless and out of luck? cuz maybe we’re just too drunk on the thrill of the hunt…
now we’re living show to show and apartments come and go
we never take it slow. we’re just burning up the road
now i got the strangest cough. when i told you everything would be alright, baby i was wrong
i guess i’m lost lost lost. i guess i’m lost with a snake-oil salesman’s job, just slitherin’ along
_________
I got to participate in a songwriters week held there last week (Dark Songs). It was the 3rd event like it I’ve been to. Seems like I was able to churn out a lot more ideas in the past but this last week I felt totally unproductive and stalled out for the most part. I managed to finish this tune but it was something I had been messing with for a couple weeks so I didn’t get my co-write on as much as I wanted to. Working with Heidi Spencer was really cool though. She sings on it and we did another tune I really dig called “2 Saloon Ghosts” that we have to record still…
wrote this one on tour last month…
Here’s a live version Shawn and I did on WMSE:
Bourbon St.
walk along the cobblestone, late night lights and halfway homes
breaking bottles and the drone of button accordion and saxophone
diesel fumes conceal the moon like last night’s mess with cheap perfume
where pickpockets move with shameless means
ain’t it hard to love on bourbon st?
dirty decks of playing cards, all-night-girls and after bars
surly drunks with bloody teeth and restless dreams in tangled sheets
heard every hard luck story twice, been held up with a pocket knife
it’s a flighty and nightly new year’s eve
it’s hard to love on bourbon st
see it in every junkie’s stare,
in every cheap motel in disrepair
every homeless kid with matted hair
spare-changin on the quarter pier
in every hustler’s smile with silver teeth
where every band’s setlist is a tired routine
what a wonderful world, brown eyed girl
margaritaville and girl from ipanema play on repeat
and it’s hard
it’s hard to love on bourbon st
never see the lights go dim or the street musicians pack it in
every night’s a saturday with deals to make and debts to pay
these girls are lonesome company with vices strong as the will to breathe
never finding time to sleep
it’s hard to love on bourbon st
So, in August John Statz and I set out for the 3 weeks and did 20-some shows through Canada and the Eastern US. It was a killer trip and I hope we can get back out soon. Check out John’s blog for some good photos and tour stories.
writing tunes at the Holiday Motel
Here’s a few of the tunes from this year’s Steel Bridge Songfest. These are rough mixes but they’ll be touched up eventually. Giant, oversized thanks to pAt macdonald, melaniejane, Christie Weber, Anna Sacks, Steve Hamilton and the Holiday Motel and the whole crew for putting us up for the week and being so hospitable and accommodating our crazy hours and hair-brained antics.
“Nothing Comes Naturally”
Wrote this real late the night after the fest with Dustin Welch, who is playing Dobro.
“Rattlin’ the Cage”
Wrote this rocking little 5/4 ditty the first day of the Construction Zone with Christine Flores-Cozza and Loren Wollerman. The band is Greg Roteik (bass), Adam Cargin (drums), me (gtr, vox, keys), Dustin Welch (banjo), Victor DeLorenzo (junk percussion) and Delaney Davidson did some slide trombone. We recorded the drums, guitar, bass and vocals live! … which I love! Band stuff has almost always been layered one piece at a time for me and it was a good feeling to be able to do it all live. It’s not perfect but it’s got some teeth and it’s one unedited take of the rhythm section and main vocal. Loren recorded some horn parts as well, which will be on the final version.
“Evidence”
I had this one completed coming in but still felt like it was missing something, a name… Dustin aptly titled it “Evidence” and we went in and recorded it in the wee hours as things were winding down, which ended up being hopelessly out of tune so here is a live version Shawn and I did on WMSE.
The recording engineers at Steel Bridge are real champs. We would be up with Steve recording at 7am and somehow he’d be ready to rock at 11am the next day.
Sometime a few months ago I got up, had some coffee and wrote this… I think if it has a home, it is in a childrens movie.
