Shoebox Full of Tapes

20 Comments to “#1: Reverting to Type”

1. At 10:35 am on January 29th, 2006, Will wrote:

   I love the design, I love the blurb, I love the song. Good job.

2. At 1:56 pm on January 29th, 2006, David Pukin wrote:

   Hey Lindsey. I see you are making music again. That’s cool. I am at work right now but I will try to give this song a listen in the next few days after I am done with a stats assignment for class.

   I am not sure if you got my message on your phone. But after that we tried using Steven’s paypal atm card (they finally sent him a new one after several months) to do an online donation to Make-A-Wish. If that goes through, then we can arrange to give the Act IV donations that way instead of what I suggested earlier.

   Also, it would be cool if you could give some advice on properly using CSS to work in all browsers. I can send you some links if you’re interested. I was able to fiddle around with the code to make a webpage look proper in Mozilla, but it doesn’t work in IE, the reverse is true for all my other CSS. It would be needlessly complicated if I had to make a copy for every page for each browser.

   take care,
   David

3. At 5:48 pm on January 29th, 2006, unbottled soul wrote:

   intelligent music for intelligent people/down the launch tubes 40some hours later…

   This post consists of three things:

   Lindsey Kuper’s revamped rockstargirl.org, now known as Shoebox Full of Tapes
   a four-poem website update on my part, somewhat later than planned
   some thoughts on college, both mine and other people’s life is c…

4. At 9:47 pm on January 29th, 2006, Jenn wrote:

   I dig it.

5. At 10:06 am on January 30th, 2006, Lindsey wrote:

   Thanks for the comments and trackback, guys!

   David, I emailed you about Make-A-Wish. And we can talk about CSS sometime if you want. Heh. Shoebox Full of Tapes, the world’s first songwriting and cross-browser CSS advice podcast.

6. At 10:07 pm on January 31st, 2006, unbottled soul » Blog Archive » moments of happiness wrote:

   […] Today, after having a dream dog me all day, would be defined as Reverting to Type. This evening was defined as You’re Beautiful for a few minutes and then changed to Try Not To Stare for the rest of the night. […]

7. At 11:31 am on February 5th, 2006, unbottled soul » Blog Archive » Kuper kudos wrote:

   […] Comparing Kuper’s two Shoebox songs thus far, I prefer Recent Scars over Reverting to Type because Recent Scars has more universal appeal. Or maybe it just speaks to me. While I really like the idea behind Reverting to Type and I think Kuper did a pretty good job getting the idea across, Recent Scars just resonates with me. Recent Scars is specific enough to paint a picture we can relate to, but not so specific that we don’t get all of the references, as can be a problem with Reverting to Type (”Rushing down Sherman to MAB”). Of course, in my poetry I have allusions that people won’t get either, unless they do their homework and/or know my poetry very well since I allude to past poems in addition to external things. […]

8. At 12:38 pm on February 5th, 2006, Lindsey wrote:

   Thanks, Nick!

   MAB is the Music Administration Building on the Northwestern campus, just off Sherman Avenue in Evanston, Illinois. I used to live a few blocks away and was constantly sneaking in to use the practice rooms, despite the signs they put up to scare off anyone who (heaven forbid) wasn’t a current piano or vocal performance major at NU.

   Adam Schlesinger of Fountains of Wayne (who cram their songs full of place names) had some interesting thoughts on the importance of place in songwriting in the band’s Austin City Limits interview a few years back. I guess it wasn’t the most coherent interview in the world, especially now that I see it in print, but it jumped out at me when he said, “You don’t actually have to know the place to identify with the character in the song or something, but I think actually sometimes making it more specific helps to make it more vivid for people.” That’s what I’m going for.

9. At 2:08 am on February 6th, 2006, Nick wrote:

   It’s a good thing it’s 4 in the morning, I can’t sleep and refreshed the SFoT tab I still had open and noticed your comment. I was just thinking that it was weird that you hadn’t responded to my post where I had reviewed your latest. I guess you did and I just didn’t know it.

   To that end, I suggust you get a comment-notification plugin akin to the one I use.

   Of course, unless I’d come back here, I’d never have known since you were responding to a trackback, not a comment I’d actually typed out in this nice little box with the allowed XHTML all nicely listed in grey above it.

10. At 2:14 am on February 6th, 2006, Nick wrote:

    Ohhhh. *brain wave* You were rushing up the crooked stairs of the MAB and the keys were piano keys. Before, I completely assumed you were going up the crooked stairs to your apartment and the keys were your apartment keys.

    And I hope you always remain reverted to the musical type you are.

    And, speaking of plugins, providing a spell-checking plugin to those of us who aren’t the best spellers in the world would be great. Of course, we could just keep using Gmail as our spell-checker.

11. At 2:16 am on February 6th, 2006, Nick wrote:

    Oh yeah, links to the content we talk about (namely, spell-checker plugins for WordPress) are nice, aren’t they?

12. At 7:24 am on February 6th, 2006, Lindsey wrote:

    Before, I completely assumed you were going up the crooked stairs to your apartment and the keys were your apartment keys.

    I never thought of that. Cool.

    (The subscribe-to-comments option is a good idea. A comments feed seems like overkill, but I could deal with subscribe-to-comments as long as it wasn’t turned on by default. And I hate spell-checkers, but I’ll think about it.)

13. At 10:55 pm on February 6th, 2006, Nick wrote:

    The other thing I thought of at 4:30 this morning (er, Monday), aside from trying podcasting myself, was that perhaps you could include some sort of liner notes or background to songs that need it—in this case, explaining Sherman and MAB. (Oh my gosh the song makes so much more sense now!)

    I have a feeling that you won’t like the idea, but I thought I’d throw it out there nonetheless.

14. At 11:30 pm on February 6th, 2006, Lindsey wrote:

    Nick — I thought that what I wrote up there was background! If you mean as actually part of the recording, I might do that if I were a better speaker, but I’m a lot worse at talking than I am at singing.

    Plus, y’know, I don’t want to force the discussion on people who really just want the songs, so I figure I’ll give them the songs in the recordings, and that if they also want the discussion, they know where to find it. And I also don’t want to force my own interpretations on anyone. It’s cool to see how other people interpret it — like with the keys thing.

15. At 11:55 pm on February 6th, 2006, Nick wrote:

    What was up there was background, is background and will always be background (sorry, I just finished reading Slaughterhouse-Five. I’ve got a little Tralfalmadorian in me, I guess!).

    I don’t think you should speak either, I think the podcasts are best as just songs (though, I suppose you could have the podcast with the discussion in it too, and then a separate file of just the song available as well—that’d be cool). But if you included a little backgound (as you see fit — if it’s needed) in the blog entry, that would be nice. What you could also do is use WordPress’ “more” tag to hide the background info from your readers so that they wouldn’t have to see it if they didn’t want to. “More” is like an lj-cut except that it just hides the rest of the entry from that point onward. Or you could tell the story behind the song/give the background later on in the week (so we don’t just have new content on Sundays!) or something like that.

    I would say play around with it a bunch, but I think it’s already awfully awesome, so yeah. Play with caution. Wear your hardhat.

16. At 11:57 pm on February 6th, 2006, Nick wrote:

    I would say play around with it a bunch, but I think it’s already awfully awesome, so yeah. Play with caution. Wear your hardhat.

    And I was the one who suggusted a small change in the first place… OK, it is totally bedtime in Nick-land.

17. At 1:30 am on February 7th, 2006, Lindsey wrote:

    Okay, I’m convinced of the need for a meta-SFoT discussion area.

18. At 12:57 pm on March 28th, 2006, Brian wrote:

    I like the site. I am doing something similar on a podcast called RoughMix where I talk about my music is made and give examples of the rough process.

19. At 1:12 pm on May 11th, 2006, unbottled soul » Blog Archive » wrestling with fucked-up failure again wrote:

    […] [The italic bits were based upon on Lindsey Kuper songs: 1 - Reverting to Type 2 - You’re Beautiful] […]

20. At 7:35 am on April 21st, 2007, Shoebox Full of Tapes » #19: Fake Plastic Trees wrote:

    […] 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. […]

Shoebox Full of Tapes is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License by Lindsey Kuper.

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