new song -”Show to Show” + co-writer’s block

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…

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…

 

Bourbon St.

wrote this one on tour last month…

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

 

Tour Recap

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.

 

Steel Bridge Songfest ‘09 tunes: Rattlin’ the Cage, Evidence, Nothing comes naturally

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. This is a demo Shawn and I threw together in July.

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.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_DeLorenzo

 

Extra spooky sauce

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.

 

Everybody Knows (how this goes)

Here’s a tune Robbie Schiller and I wrote sometime back in the fall and kind of forgot about.  We both really liked the words but couldn’t quite find the right arrangement.  We were playing some tunes the other day and decided to tinker with it a little more.  We changed the chords up and revamped the bridge and it turned out pretty cool with the help of an integral bassline on the guitar in the chorus and banjo part.   I’m starting to think that banjo makes everything better…

The bridge has some of my favorite lines in it:

When it starts to feel like ancient history you crane your neck for something you can’t see

You wanna climb the fence with a knife between your teeth but you just stagger drunk out into busy streets

 

We don’t need much but skin to touch

courtesy of youbethemouse.blogspot.com

Here’s a new tune called “Skin to Touch”.  It was recorded by the all-knowing and ever-patient, Andy Hartman with one of the new projects I been playing with, Jeremiah Nelson & the Shifty Switches.

We’ll be at the Frequency on Friday March 6th with John Statz & the Cheap Shots, and Whitney Mann & the Boys.  10pm $6 – best time ever.

 

THE WILLIS on the Late Night w/ Jimmy Fallon + NYC show 2/26

You heard right – the Willis will be doing a live taping of their song, “Jimmy Fallon: the Plan” on the actual Late Night show with Jimmy Fallon. That evening they will be at Bar 9 in NYC. If you have every spen ten minutes with me, you have probably heard me rave about the genius of this Oshkosh band.  I was able to do a couple shows with the related and equally awesome project, Attack Octopus last year. Check ‘em out! http://myspace. com/thewillis http://myspace. com/attackoctopus ATTACK, OCTOPUS: “Gulf of”

 

Odessa Sand

“Banjo means bathroom in Spanish” as Townes Van Zandt joked at at show once…

I always thought banjo had the most lonesome, ringing sound.  This one is called “Odessa Sand” and it was actually on the scrap pile until recently.  I wrote it on guitar but played it much more drippy and blandly.  I thought I would give it a whirl on banjo and I think it transferred beautifully.  My old neighbor on Jenny St., Clay Collins,  let me borrow his for a while so I’ve been arranging some tunes on it.  Something about the banjo really brings out the heartbreak in songs.

Geography

is what this one is all about, running into the same emotion all across the country albeit on a fictional trip.  I wanted to open the tune with a town I’d lived or spent time in but nothing fit the meter as good as Atlanta.  The next verse starts with my favorite line,

I miss the mountains like my Grandfather’s smile

Troubles all around me don’t seem worth their while

I wanted to evoke a geographically specific type of imagary in each verse so the next and final verse ends in Odessa, TX with carnitas, friholes and mezcal.

 

I don’t mind being lonely and I don’t mind hotel rooms: a song and a conversation with Kristin Diable

Louisiana native and Brooklyn resident, Kristin Diable, has been touring regularly and releasing albums on her own imprint, Speakeasy Records since the early 2000’s. Recently her tune “Gypsy Queen” was picked up by the TV series, One Tree Hill.

We bumped into each other at a college music conference last year. She happened to be coming through WI for a show so I thought we’d get her down to Madison for a special night at Mickey’s Tavern, sharing the stage with Jentri Colello.

After the show we recorded one of her new tunes called, Minnesota and had a chat about the writing process.

I thought I would notate the interview but that proved to be excessively laborious and I had audio for it so I thought this piece could be more mixed media. I concluded that my interviewing voice is akin to a stoned monkey so I did my best to edit out myself asking the questions.

The hook line

of the tune is, “Most days I don’t think of you at all” which is a powerful and interesting line, in that it is both intensely personal but also accessible and relatable as a listener.

“I know exactly what those words mean… and it’s what they’re not saying…It starts off in all different ways like sometimes I’ll get a line and that line says everything – that one line – it’s just it. And I have to write the song around that line. Those are the best songs I think – and those are rare – those are the really special songs”

“Generally I’m not trying to condense my experience into a song

because I’m experiencing all of these things…. It’s slow… It processes really slowly and you know three months after I’ve experienced something it’s like this fuckin’ revelation and everything makes sense all the sudden. But I didn’t even know that I was aware it made sense. All the little pieces were just sitting there in your person and you put them together and suddenly you have this great song and you understand your life… and songs are uncannily insightful in new scenarios that you haven’t even figured out yet…”

Links:

http://kristindiable.com/

http://myspace.com/kristindiable