Shoebox Full of Tapes

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I’m both happy and sad about this week’s podcast. I’m happy because I’ve wanted this amazing Mountain Goats song to be part of SFoT right from the beginning. I played this song daily for close to a year; it was stuck in my head for five months, shattering the previous four-month record held by “Raspberry Beret”; and now I’ve finally, finally had a chance to do it for the podcast. (No CC license on this one, obviously.) I can’t think of a better way to wrap up half a year of Shoebox Full of Tapes, which is what this coming Saturday will mark.

And that’s where we get to the sad part: I’m pretty much out of songs at this point. See, unlike Jonathan Coulton, I can’t write a song every week. I average about four per year that I want to keep, actually. So, after this week, “we”, meaning me, will be “in reruns” for a while, meaning that I’m re-podcasting these first six months in the original order.

The second time around, I’m hoping to clean up the metadata, as well as make things like volume and EQ a little more consistent. Some of them won’t change much at all, but others ought to be much improved. And maybe there’ll be some other pretties, like photos (I’ve got a box of those too), or explications that I didn’t do the first time around. I’ll do what I can for you guys. It’ll be cool, I think.

The new Mountain Goats record comes out August 22. They’ll be touring, too. See them. Buy it.

Thanks for listening.

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Hey! New song!

This one’s been slowly stewing for a while, and I’ve slowly been realizing that it owes a big debt to Sufjan Stevens — and not just ’cause of the place names. I didn’t always write these collage-y kinds of lyrics. (Also, I think that my roommate, who plays drums and guitar and who helped me record this tonight, wishes that I were more rhythmically creative. She’s not so much into this steady-eighth-notes thing, but I just keep coming back to how my favorite songs on Illinois are the ones with the really simple and predictable rhythms. It’s not that I don’t appreciate cool rhythms — it’s that I don’t want the lyrics to have anything to hide behind.)

Alert listeners may recognize the songs that get namechecked here and/or the Lindsey Kuper Experiences to which they correspond. Or maybe not.

So what are yours?

Snowflakes on the windshield
as we drove north from Champaign
Falling asleep in the front seat
Charms and feigns

The summer I lived in Austin
The night that Shearwater played
Scrawling a note in the front row ’cause
I can’t wait

Sterile and echoing hallway
Close off the windows and doors
If you need me, I’ll be with
The only living boy in New York

So what are yours?

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More dorm-room demos: here’s a song that Tanny and I wrote together back in 2003. The words are all his. (No CC license on this one.) Thanks for listening.

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We worked on adding new things to our repertoire at band practice tonight, since sometime soon, someone’s going to expect us to know more than five songs. I’d been kind of worried about “Rock Star Girl” since I hadn’t played it in so long, but it felt great to dust it off and to hear what Brian’s drumming adds to the song. “Reverting” was a bigger challenge — we’d actually tried to do this one a couple months ago, and it hadn’t gone well, so we’d left it alone for a while, but after tonight I’m pretty happy about how it’s starting to take shape.

Neither one is quite ready to tape, though. So, for now, have a Radiohead cover that Tanny Phillips and I did sometime in 2003. (Obviously, the usual CC license doesn’t apply.) This was one of Tanny’s favorite songs, and hearing it again now, I think it bears witness to the fact that by this time I had listened to the first Reputation record a few hundred times and had sort of started to learn how to sing in a more matter-of-fact, less histrionic way. Sort of.

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Last week I, um, sort of forgot to update SFoT because I was on vacation. Man, do I suck. As penance, I submit this week’s Pathetic Geek Stories-worthy podcast, which is subtitled “When we’re famous, they won’t be able to dig up any embarrassing stuff from my past, because I’ll have dug all of it up already and posted it on SFoT! Ha-HA!”

So. In early 2000, around the time I was applying to Grinnell, they used to (and still do) invite prospective students to hang out with current students for a weekend to get a sense of what college life is like. Sometimes, the result is positive. Other times, the result is keg parties overrun with gauche, dorky seventeen-year-olds eager to make a good impression. So here’s seventeen-year-old prospie me, at a party where I probably shouldn’t have been in the first place, and I saw a great-looking guy dancing. Our eyes met, just for a second: insta-crush! (When you’re 17, is there any other kind?)

The following morning, I had to go to an interview at the admissions office, and I was releasing some pre-interview tension on the piano in a nearby dorm lounge. As I was leaving, I caught the same guy in the hallway…he’d been listening outside the door. Damn. We talked for a while, but I’m not sure if I heard a word he said, because all I could think was, “Holy crap, I have to go to college here.”

Once I was actually going to school there, of course, I discovered that he (a) was gay and (b) had forgotten about the whole thing, which was probably just as well. Like any number of non-starter insta-crushes I’ve had, though, I managed to get a song out of it. I classify “Fairydust” along with “Compromise” and the other stuff I was working on at the time: too hastily written (the second verse? ugh — I’m cringing just typing it out, here), and I don’t like the way I sang it, but there’s still something salvageable, I think. If you can find it, it’s yours for the taking.

In non-six-years-ago news, Brian and I might finally get to make some decent recordings here in the next couple days. Our show on the 14th went really well, and we’re itchin’ to play out more. What would you choose for a three-song Tryst demo?

Have you ever seen beauty for a moment?
It comes between the best-laid plans
The fleeting flash of brilliant eyes, before you turn away
The perfect snowflake, melting in your hand
It was just the first or second time I saw you
I’ll never understand your gravity
Have you ever seen beauty for a moment?
I’ll take your fairydust with me

Have you ever seen beauty for a moment?
It comes when you would least expect
The lines of your face
Baby, don’t change
I’d hate to lose what I cannot forget
I was wrapped up in my own mind until I saw you
May everyone forgive your vanity
Have you ever seen beauty for a moment?
I’ll take your fairydust with me

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First things first: We have a show this coming Wednesday night, and it’s not even in my living room! If you’re in Portland, Oregon on June 14, please come see Tryst (and five other bands!) play at the White Eagle as part of a local second-Wednesday songwriters’ showcase called Cocktail Hour. It’s free and “starts” at 8:30, which is to say that it probably starts at 9:00. Here’s the show info from the McMenamins website.

*does the woohoo-we-actually-have-a-show, we-might-be-a-real-band-yet happy dance*

Now then. SFoT went on vacation last week while I was running a marathon, but this week we’re back with more rehearsal tapeage. I think this must’ve been the second or third time that we’d ever tried to play this song. There are a few other takes from the same night (all bad in completely different ways), but I won’t subject you to the rest of them. I did, however, leave some stuff at either end of the clip so that you can experience for yourself how incredibly glamorous it is to be in our band. Lyrics. Also, if the file size seems really small for both this and #16, it’s because they’re in mono, ’cause we can’t seem to get GarageBand to bounce a stereo file. Us very professional.

See you Wednesday night!

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Tryst is so new, we don’t have a website yet. Hell, we’re so new, we’re not even on MySpace. (If you don’t know what that is, consider yourself lucky.) And we’ve played exactly one show, which may or may not have been attended by anyone who was not actually a member of one of the other bands who played. But now, this week, in a startling confirmation of rumors that we actually exist, we’re podcasting a song! It’s just a live demo, and a pretty bad recording at that, but hey, you take your SM58 and your borrowed drum kit and GarageBand running on your already-outdated PowerBook and you make what you can of it, right? And it is my great honor and privilege this week to introduce Brian, my friend and co-conspirator, not to mention the only drummer in Portland who shows up on time and sober…

I posted the lyrics back in February, the first time this song appeared on SFoT. Thank you for listening, and for forgiving our inevitable mistakes as we figure out how to be a band. We’re just getting started.

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In the short time that I’ve been making music, and the shorter time that I’ve been trying to figure out how to give it away for free on the Internet, it has been my privilege to have made the acquaintance of a few people who, for one reason or another, seem to enjoy listening to it. As anyone who’s ever read the comments around here undoubtedly already knows, Nick May has pretty much established himself as the official SFoT trackback-and-comment maven-in-residence and fan-at-large. One thing about Nick is that he usually wants to know the backstory. About everything. Even if it doesn’t exist. Not that that’s ever really been an issue, considering that he has proven himself more than capable of making it up himself if necessary — but tonight, as it turns out, the song is preceded by the backstory that I wrote in a comment in his blog a couple hours ago. Or, at least, a backstory. Or, rather, one interpretation of one small part of one of any number of possible backstories, as filtered through two large mugs of strong coffee at the Red and Black this evening, along with franticness that increased at a rate inversely proportional to that of my decreasing battery charge as I tried to type it all out before my laptop died.

Now that I’m back at home and plugged in again, I can relax (well, sort of relax — man, they really don’t fuck around when they make that coffee, do they?) and tell some back-backstory: this is a cover of a song called “Home” that I did five years ago for Act 4, which was a Smashing Pumpkins tribute concert benefiting the Make-a-Wish Foundation. (Since I didn’t write it, the usual license doesn’t apply.) I kind of sucked when I played at the actual show, but this recording isn’t too bad, and it ended up on the accompanying tribute album that we made, the proceeds from which also went to Make-a-Wish. So there was that. I really like this song; I first heard it on a Pumpkins tour bootleg in my college dorm room when I was nineteen, and had to get up and run downstairs to the lounge at three in the morning to flail at the piano until I had figured out how I was going to play it. By the way, you can’t buy the original in any store; you can only get it in any of the numerous places where it’s given away, for free, on the Internet.

Thanks, always, for listening.

My new band, Tryst, had our first show last night!

Okay, so my drummer, Brian, and I only know a few songs so far, and yeah, so the show was sort of…at my house. (Line I forgot to use: “We’re so indie, we barely even exist.”) But still! First show! The Jigsaw Gentlemen, Chris Corbell, and Douglas Shepherd played as well, and in case four bands and a keg and a half didn’t put it completely over the top as house parties go, we even had a couple of belly dancers. All of the performers were great. I couldn’t have asked for a friendlier or more talented group of people to help us make the party a success. And our set was well-received, too. Thanks to all of you who made it out! I can’t wait for our next show!

I wanted to put up a song today, but I need to pause for breath — I spent the day cleaning up our living room, which looked like, uh, like a rock show happened in it last night. So instead of a song, here’s a different kind of art — the beautiful flyer illustration that Indigo Kelleigh made for the show. We’re all out of the first run of flyers (naturally — they’re all up on telephone poles around town, no doubt being flyered over with something else as we speak), but if any of you are interested, it’s no trouble for me to make some more and give you one. Let me know.

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In the fall of 2000, I was in my first semester of college. Needing a fix one night, I snuck into a practice room in the basement of my school’s music building with the intention of playing something else, probably a Smashing Pumpkins song. This was what came out instead. I didn’t have any paper on me, and I tore home to attempt to write down what I had just sung before it slipped away. What you see written here now is as close as I could come that night.

Before writing “The Song Nobody Knows”, both my songs sucked. After writing it, I decided that I might really be able to do this, which was what eventually led to actually studying music in college, which, among other perks, made it so I didn’t have to sneak into the practice rooms anymore. This recording, which was made a few months later, leaves a lot to be desired, but I have to remember that I was eighteen and so was my friend who was recording me and neither of us knew what the hell we were doing yet. Nevertheless, this made it onto the Freesound comp in 2001, which feels like two or three lifetimes ago. I’m not sure if I even remember how to play this one. I’ve learned my lesson, though: I carry a notebook with me now.

My favorite song is the song nobody knows
I hear it only in my head
And when we reach across the wires,
I feel you and the memories we had
When I was six years old
I wanted to change my name
Now I just want everyone to know who I am
But how can they know me if they don’t know
That my favorite song is the song nobody knows
I hear it only inside
Looking out the rain-streaked windows as the bus goes by
Do you share my sentiment?
Do you feel the way I feel?
Do you know the song I know?
Do you know how it goes?
Because my favorite song is the song nobody knows
I feel it only in my dreams
And when we reach across the wires,
I feel you reaching back through me
And then I see that beneath the show
I know you know the song nobody knows

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I was holding back with this one, waiting until I was really desperate for something to put up. I guess I’m really desperate this week.

These are the lyrics as they are now; the recording’s old. It was a shock to listen to it and realize that I haven’t always sung “can’t stop thinking about you” in the last chorus, because that’s so much a part of the song now. Weird.

We talk about how the day went
in words that are always plain
No superfluous affectations
No pretenses get in our way
You’re always so real and always
unchangingly uncontrived
And it’s taken a while, but I’ve finally
I’ve finally realized
That you’re beautiful
More beautiful with each day as they keep flying along
And I can’t stop thinking about how insane it is
That I was the one who never noticed

We talk about how the day went
We talk about all our friends
We talk about everything but
This thing I don’t understand
I still don’t know how it started,
and you’re as amazed as I
With you it’s just so easy
I don’t even have to try
Because you’re beautiful
More beautiful with each day as they keep flying along
And I can’t stop thinking about how insane it is
That I was the one who never noticed

You’re always plain
No affectations and no cliches
With all these reasons, it’s unbelievable
To think I once needed
Any convincing at all
That you’re beautiful
More beautiful with each day as they keep flying along
And I can’t stop thinking about you
And how I could have taken so long
And never noticed

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I have a shoebox full of tapes. No, really. It’s actually more of a plastic storage container, and they’re mostly CDs and DATs, but I’ve been carrying this thing around with me for years, and everything I’ve recorded over the past five years has gone into it. I started SFoT not only because I had new music to share, but because I had a lot of old music too. Some of it deserves to see the light of day, some of it probably doesn’t, but it’s definitely not doing anyone any good sitting in the box, you know?

So this week, just in case it was killing you not knowing what “Chase” sounded like before it sounded like “Chase”, here’s an older demo of the same song. Meanwhile, back in the present, I’ve been practicing with a new drummer for a couple weeks now, getting closer to doing what we really want to do, which is play rock shows. We’re not going to record anything until we’re ready and it won’t go on SFoT unless all contributors are okay with that, and that’s why, for a while here, I don’t think I’ll really have much new stuff to share. But I’ve still got this box — and yes, the box actually exists, it’s about two feet from my elbow right now — and I’m still going to try my damnedest to dig up something “new” that’s not too cringe-inducing, every week. Maybe I’ll discover some things I hadn’t heard before, either.

Thanks for listening!

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Let me be your rock star girl
just because I think that I could love you
more than everyone already does
We could show each other
how to see and to be seen
Don’t you think that we’d be perfect
in every magazine?
I will be your rock star girl
if you’ll be my rock star boy
Happily ever after until next year comes around
Writing songs that are much too long
Pretending we are profound
Don’t look now
I see your makeup streaming down

Let me be your rock star girl
Don’t get me wrong;
I understand that we are hopeless
but it’s okay just as long
as we both swallow our ambitions
Turn your good face to the man
Don’t you see, they see right through
your visionary plans?
I will be your rock star girl
if you’ll be my rock star boy
Happily ever after or until we both pass out
Writing songs that are much too long
Pretending we are profound
And we’ll freak out with our makeup streaming down

It’s amazing just how free you are
when you’re doomed before you begin
in some kind of psychic sellout
where the highest concept wins
I will be your rock star girl
if you’ll be my rock star boy
Happily ever after or until we hit the ground
Writing songs that are much too long
Pretending we are profound
And we’ll break up with our makeup streaming down

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Here’s another kind-of-old song. This one has evolved, so a different version is likely to turn up on SFoT before too long.

Thanks for listening.

As soon as I have something to lose,
it’s strange how each day passing
only leaves me more confused
and each decision matters more than I ever knew
All my temporary answers,
it turns out are no use
But I’m changing,
’cause changing is all I ever do
As soon as I have something to lose

As soon as I have something to lose,
it’s strange how each day passing
realigns my point of view
to meet the whirl of thoughts that I’ve been wandering through
And dreams almost forgotten,
yet so hard to refuse
But I’m changing,
’cause changing is all I ever do
As soon as I have something to lose

And I keep on getting closer,
but it seems like as soon as I have something
to show for what I’m trying to prove,
as soon as I have something to lose,
it’s strange how all my thoughts
are redefined in terms of you
and each decision matters more than I ever knew
and each decision rests on what I think you might choose
But I’m changing,
’cause changing is all I ever do
As soon as I have something to lose

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Just so we’re clear: this is a Bob Dylan song; the usual copyright and Creative Commons licensing do not apply; I have no permission whatsoever to use it; and I’ll remove it if asked.

It’s just a song I really like.

Enjoy and have a great week. I’ll be back next weekend, perhaps even with something I actually wrote!

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Here’s another old song dug up from the bottom of the box. That’s Tanny playing guitar.

There’s pretty much just one idea here, and I’ve found that some people like it for just that reason, while others find that it’s too simplistic and repetitive for their taste. Maybe it depends on how recently, if ever, you felt this way.

I’d happily stand here alone all day
Just to watch you walk down the stairs
Trying to think of what I could say
That might make you smile if you happened to hear
I’d happily stand here alone all day
Just to watch you and try not to stare
Try not to stare

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This is one of those old songs that won’t go away. It’s the song that “You’ve Got Her Number” grew out of; it’s here for historical reasons, I guess, and because Maya said she liked it.

Y’know, I do think there’s a lot of good stuff in here, in between the banalities (like “reap what we sowed” — that’s got to go, dude) and the affected singing and the way I plow the phone metaphor into the ground, and I’m still working on it, and I’ll probably get a song I like out of it someday. At the time I wrote it I’m sure I thought that “I don’t know what I want, but I want it so bad” was a stroke of genius of “I believe when I fall in love with you, it will be forever” proportions. These days I’m just as likely to sing, “I don’t know what I want, but I don’t want it that bad.”

I don’t know what I want, but I want it so bad
I don’t know what I want, but I want it so bad
I always believed that we’d reap what we sowed
I thought of your number and reached for the phone
How to be independent and still depend on you?
How to love you completely
and have a way out in case it falls through?
How do I settle these two?
I don’t want to compromise you
I don’t know what I want, but I want it so bad
I hope that this will connect me to you
Even though I’m scared of this call going through
How to be independent and still depend on you?
How to love you completely
and have a way out in case it falls through?
How do I settle these two?
Don’t make me compromise you
I don’t know what I want, but I want it so bad
I always believed that we’d make this work out
I guess now you know what this call is about
I can’t be independent and still depend on you
And I know I can’t love you and have a way out
If this won’t go through, then
It’s hard enough just to keep talking to you
And now you want me to compromise, too
I don’t know what I want, but I want it so bad
I don’t know what I want, but I want it so bad

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When taken together, holidays, road trips, and long showers are a pretty good recipe for awakening the muse; I came up with this song in the shower in a Kansas City hotel room around Christmas 2002. It always cried out to be played with a band, and finally, in spring ‘04, my short-lived college band (Tanny Phillips, guitar; JP Ramos, drums) made this recording for the same comp that “Union Station” was on. (At our school, bandcest was widespread enough that if somebody played on one song on the comp, they probably played on more than one.) We weren’t all that great, but I think you can hear at least a whisper of what this song is supposed to be. Thanks for listening.

Breathing heavy every time he walked by
Feeling ready when his eyes met mine
I loved to push him, loved to hear him protest
Knew it was over when he finally said yes

I love the chase; the rest is no fun
Why do the boys here always let me down?
I love the chase, and before I’m done,
I’ll probably chase them all right out of this town

Don’t know what happened to my crush on you
Remember all the crazy things I would do?
Followed you home; I drove out of my way
Just ain’t the same now that we talk every day

I love the chase; the rest is no fun
Why do the boys here always let me down?
I love the chase, and before I’m done,
I’ll probably chase them all right out of this town

Get me out of here
Am I the only one?
Sure could use a change and I’ve barely begun
Chasing people around
Did I hear someone say settle down?

I set the cruise control to seventy-five
I caught my breath as I watched him pass by
I saw his suitcase and guitar in the back
I smiled a little and I stepped on the gas

I love the chase; the rest is no fun
Why do the boys here always let me down?
I love the chase, and before I’m done,
I’ll probably chase them all right out of this town

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When I was studying jazz in college, some of the flavor of the stuff we were working on in class started to creep into my songs unexpectedly.

Leaning on the left mains with my drink in my hand
See, I seem to have this problem where I remember everything
And all the floorboards resonate in quiet sympathy
’cause you bear enough resemblance to this boy who’s holding me

Giving up my place, I have to get some air
Stumbling to the back, I see you standing by the stairs
Did you know I’d be here, or was it the other way around?
You sure do make it easy for your hangers-on

Now I know
I’ve been so wrong this time
Wrong enough to totally misread the situation
Now it’s too late to change my mind

This must have been a good show, ’cause I can barely stand
See, I seem to have this problem with escapism’s demands
And all the floorboards resonate in quiet sympathy
’cause lonely at a rock show is as lonely as you can be

Now I know
I’ve been so wrong this time
Wrong enough to miss all of the obvious signs
Wrong enough to try to change your mind

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A couple weeks ago, I sat down to work on a song called “Compromise” which I’ve never quite been satisfied with since I wrote it in 2002. I normally wouldn’t have even dragged it out except that I was getting nervous about my writing not being able to keep pace with SFoT, and I thought that maybe I could buy some time by dusting off songs from the reject pile, seeing about fixing the most cringeworthy bits, and then passing them off as new, without, you know, actually having to write entirely new ones.

Hah.

And there are about fourteen pages in my lyrics notebook to document the process by which “Compromise” then became “You’ve Got Her Number”, but still, damned if I understand how it happened. The only words they have in common are “reach for the phone”. It’s not like I’ve ever really set out to write a new song, but this time I was actually trying to do something else and the song happened in spite of it. They’re incorrigible like that. I think that at some point I must’ve just realized that the new stuff I was writing was being dragged down by the old stuff, and that there was enough there for a story in its own right.

It started out in the first person, but someone I showed the lyrics to felt that “How many rings will each of us wait?” didn’t make sense, ’cause why would the other person wait — wasn’t the singer supposed to be the screwed-up one? I’d been trying to convey that maybe both participants were a little screwed up, and that they could play on each other’s neuroses by doing things as minor as (not) answering the phone. I think that giving the narrator some distance from the two of them might make that idea more supposable for the listener, but I’m not sure it hits quite as hard, this way.

Jury’s out. And so am I — except to say that this week, by Will’s request, we recorded piano first and vocal second. I was really hesitant to do this ’cause I thought the songs would lose the immediacy that comes from laying down everything at once. I was wrong, wrong, wrong. It turns out that the only thing we lost was crap singing and playing. Thanks.

You’ve got her number
You reach for the phone
You might be reckless –
but she might be home
You shouldn’t care
as much as you do
Should have a way out
In case you can’t get through

How many rings
will each of you wait?
And suppose she picks up –
Just what do you think
that you’re gonna say?
You shouldn’t be nervous
Should have other plans
But you’ve got her number
You’ve got it bad