#12: Chase April 23rd, 2006
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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!
At 10:52 pm on April 24th, 2006, Nick May wrote:
I like this version better than the rock version. More real, more human, maybe?
In other news, the other day I could see how Try Not to Stare would make a kick-ass rock song. Not sure how exactly one would turn it into a rock song, per say…it seeming rather delicate (or, at least, not the sort of thing I’d imagine backed by drums)… but…mmmm, it’d be nice as a rock song. That much more vehement. It’s the song I sing along to the most.
Finally—you might want to edit the meta for Rockstar Girl and Try Not to Stare to include Tanny (if you haven’t already—I’m still using the original (SFoT) re-releases of them, not to be confused with the original (RsG.o) releases).
And I’m soo glad that these songs are being CCed…now I can put the lyrics in my poetry for sure and not even have to quote them (well, I still would, when I attribute you, just not in the body of the poem itself).
At 11:33 pm on April 24th, 2006, unbottled soul » Blog Archive » Kuper, headache, website, boring titles wrote:
[…] When it is physically painful (headache) to sing along to Lindsey Kuper’s Try Not to Stare I know it’s time to eat something and then go to bed. Today has been a really full day—woke up in the room I spent my childhood in, went to be certified to return to work by my surgeon, drove back to Iowa City, off-loaded a bunch more of my dorm room (tear), had lunch, went to lit class (!), went to second lunch, took a shower, worked on my lit paper, painted my nails for the first time since (I think) last semester, went to dinner, tried to read for class (failed because I’m sleep-deprived *doesn’t look at clock, doesn’t see that it’s 01:15*), hung out briefly with three different friends or groups thereof, chatted online with friends, went to the public library for books1, went grocery shopping, chatted for a while longer online, checked out the No Shame blog, blogged about the No Shame blog and what I found there, commented on Lindsey Kuper’s “latest”, updated my website—officially—for the first time in months, posted my comment on the No Shame blog which sorta spurred the rest of this, and then blogged about all of it [this post]. And then, presumeably, I went to bed. […]
At 8:53 am on April 25th, 2006, jes5199 wrote:
so I didn’t really think that “Chase” was very interesting… like, the lyrics didn’t do much for me. But I went ahead and listened to both versions anyway just so I could see what I was going on. And then, something funny must have happened in my brain, because I was humming it to myself for the rest of the day
At 6:39 pm on April 25th, 2006, Lindsey wrote:
Jes, yeah, I actually never felt like this one was all that interesting either, until a couple of other people singled it out as The Good One because it was the best song at our shows. Shows don’t become songs like “Rock Star Girl” — at least, they never have — but I’m hoping to change that. Soon.
Nick –
What is a rock song? What isn’t a rock song?
I can’t win. You didn’t like it when the metadata for the first “Chase” was different from the rest of SFoT, even though it was more accurate that way, so I tried to stick with keeping it the same, and now you complain about that too…
Heh. “Releases.” You make it sound so…professional. Yeah, Tanny ought to be credited. I’ll see what I can do about fixing the old metadata.
It’d be a pretty stiff policy that required you to actually mention my name within the poem itself. Although I could require that, if I wanted to — all Creative Commons says is that you have to attribute in the manner I specify. If I wanted to, I could say that every time you wanted to make a derivative work, you had to spin around three times, stand on one foot while saying the Pledge of Allegiance, and sprinkle your dorm hallway with the feathers from a chicken killed at midnight during the full moon. I wouldn’t have any way of enforcing it. But I could say that. If I wanted to.
At 8:21 pm on April 25th, 2006, jes5199 wrote:
I’m really trying to figure out what that means
At 6:43 am on April 26th, 2006, Lindsey wrote:
Sorry. “Become” as in “show to advantage”. There’s no good word for it. “Become” is confusing and “flatter” is kinda ugly.
At 1:18 pm on May 1st, 2006, Nick May wrote:
I dunno. I was just using “rock song” to mean a full-band production—just add drums. I was just thinking that somehow the music would be much…stronger? more intense? powerful? .. that the music would match the gush, the volcano, the waterfall, the rocket launch of emotion behind the lyrics of Try Not To Stare. I don’t know how the song would be implemented in such a matter as to maintain the intimate, delicate beauty of one person standing at the foot of a staircase, waiting for You to appear while at the same time also drawing the picture of what their mask of composure, aloof and casual nonchalant as they lean against the wall apparently carelessly hides—namely the torrent of emotion, the raging river of feeling beneath the surface. Somehow the song would weave all of this together…perhaps with a quiet piano solo opening, and, as the song goes on, the guitarist, (the bassist?) and the drummer would join in. Then, in between spasms of full-band, the singer could sing her heart out, pouring the emotion into the microphone, drawing the picture of composure while also doing a cut-away [drawing], to show what was inside. I imagine the use of breaks might come in handy here.
That’s, er, one…overblown conception of a possible rock song wherein the delicate is not destroyed but where the powerful emotion is not pushed to the side—where the true binary nature of the experience of standing there is expressed. Where the audience can feed off the energy of the full band and be whipped into near-frenzy by the true, raw power of the song while, a the same time, be brought to the verge of tears by the delicate dedication of near-impossibility. Or something like that, anyway.
Yeah, sorry about that. Didn’t realize I’d said that—well, forgot. Want my cake and to eat it too.
I suppose you could—if I were more inclined I would examine the legal text with this in mind, since it seems a bit iffy to me. Perhaps a court case would settle the difference and provide the necessary case law.
The humor of this paragraph, assuming there is some, is sort of lost on me. This is where the cranky, over-serious old man in me comes to the fore.
“rockstar/girl” did make it into one of my poems a couple of weeks back, in reference to one of your songs. Don’t think i’ll maek the final cut, though—assuming I can bring myself to work on the piece of shit poem…my poetry is, or so it feels, evolving so fast right now that everything I wrote a couple of weeks ago is… ugh.
At 5:21 pm on May 4th, 2006, Lindsey wrote:
Nick — that was lovely. Thank you.
At 8:58 pm on June 29th, 2006, Roy Huggins wrote:
This song keeps getting stuck in my head. Damn you, Lindsey Kuper!