All I Want This Year

I trust everyone is having a wonderful holiday season. We've had some mighty cold weather, but luckily no snowfall so far. In honor of the season, here is a song written and recorded in November 2003. My friend, Bryan, and I wrote this song for a Christmas compilation that was being put together by a small Houston label (and ultimately never came to fruition). Bryan penned the first verse and I put it to some music and wrote a chorus. At the time, we wrote a lot of songs using open-D tuning which allows the player to form a major chord just by barring any fret. I think it also allows for a greater range of notes to be strummed and produces a nice, bright tone. This also marked the first of a couple songs where we dabbled with changing time signatures, alternating 4/4 and 3/4 measures in the outro. This was still at a time in my life where I tried to sing in a higher range, which does not sound pretty. At all.





We recorded this using an SM57 and a cheap USB interface, using Cakewalk Sonar to track everything. Bryan owned everything and he was kind enough to introduce me to the concept of a Digital Audio Workstation, which soon replaced my cassette deck for recording songs.

How The World Will End

Songs tend to fall into two broad categories: personal and impersonal. Personal songs are often very specific and convey a strong emotion from the writer; your love songs or heartbreak songs, for example. Impersonal songs are cryptic, open to interpretation, and not seemingly related to the writer's experience. That's not to say that impersonal songs aren't strongly emotional or heartfelt, but they are certainly different than a first-person narrative. Of course, there are a million subcategories to be found, but I tend to place songs into these very, very broad categories.

I've never considered myself to be a good songwriter. I've been attempting to do it for 12 years now and am always my worst critic. I've always written personal songs, mostly about me, mostly about heartbreak, mostly awful. When I started writing songs for Ghostbeard in 2007, the majority of them were impersonal, that is, not directly about an episode of my life. They were stories about people told from a fictionalized narrator, with a few common themes and imagery used in each one. It was very detached and very different from what I've always done, but I loved them. For the first time, I had written songs that I would be happy to play for people. Those songs were released on What's The Word Bird?

As I began writing some new songs in 2009, they all turned out to be very personal. More personal, in fact, than anything I had written previously. Those songs were released on Stochasticity. Both albums available to download for free.

The songs I've written recently are still very personal. I have a lot of issues in my head that I constantly struggle to deal with an overcome, so I suppose these personal songs are a way of working them out. I'm uncomfortable listening to them, though. Maybe someday when my life isn't so screwed up and my head starts functioning properly, I'll be able to write a good ol' fashioned love song, but until that happens, here's a new song I recorded on Halloween.





I recorded it with a Tascam US-122mkII audio interface and a couple of cheap vocal mics. Since I don't have a bass guitar on hand, I ran my guitar through octave and chorus pedals with some EQ and a little distortion to get the bass sound. Enjoy! (and ignore my late-night ramblings about the categorization of music, I already disagree with it)

Stochasticity Song

In May of this year, we recorded the new Ghostbeard album Stochasticity. The theme and title of the album came from the Radiolab podcast which is produced by WNYC. It's an hour long program that examines different aspects of life and human nature, and is highly entertaining. It's like a science version of This American Life. One episode that I was listening to in the fall of 2009 was about stochasticity (the quality of lacking any predictable order or plan). It's incredible and available for free.

Okay, Radiolab promotion over. Unknown to me at the time, stochasticity was becoming a theme in the songs I was writing at the time. My life was being clouded by white noise, there wasn't any way for me to predict what was going to happen from day to day during this period of time. It was certainly a dark period of my life dealing with the external and internal forces that were pulling me. One song that didn't make it onto the album was "Stochasticity Song".



It's the most elaborate and professional recording I've ever made on my own: utilizing different mics, a Presonus Firepod interface with my Macbook, tracked in Cubase, and mixed in Logic. The arrangement wasn't quite right and it didn't fit in sonically with the other songs. For the intro, I set up a microphone and my son, Jonah, just started talking into it after I hit record. I also used some bird and owl sound samples, an Edward R. Murrow news report, and reversed and stretched a couple seconds from another Ghostbeard song to build up into the chorus.

Blinded By The Light

I have more "favorite" albums than I can count. Some are my favorite because of the lyrical content, some are my favorite because of the cohesive mood they create, some are my favorite because they represent a certain time in my life of which I'm fond. There are two albums that I can remember as being my first "favorites" at the young age of 7: Beach Boys Greatest Hits (Vol. 1) and The Beatles 1962-1966 (red album). I loved listening to these albums in the backseat of my Dad's truck as we drove to visit my grandparents. What I love about these albums is the vocal harmonies that the groups created. To this day, my favorite bands are ones that incorporate the voice as an instrument and create layers of harmonies. I try to use 3 and 4 part harmony whenever I can in my own songs, almost to a fault.

This is a song I recorded in late 2006 using a Tascam DP01 digital 8 track and an Audix i5 instrument microphone. I did one take on everything and it's a little extremely embarrassing to hear my voice searching for the notes in the harmony. I was fascinated by dreams at the time and wrote a collection of 10 or 12 songs, called Waking Life Is, related to dreams I'd experienced.




"Suppose They Close The Door" by Sloan inspired me to use different tempos for the verse and the chorus. Of course, they composed a much better song, as is their habit.

In a Happy Home

I've heard it said that if you love what you do, you'll never work a day in your life. What this expression tells me is I don't love what I do.

There are things that I love to do. There are things I spend hours doing in my free time. In the past couple of years I've begun learning how to record music. I've spent money to get professional equipment, learned techniques from people who do it, and devoted time to practice and execute the trade. I love talking to friends about music and discovering new bands. I love writing the entries to this blog about bad music I've made so that 4 people can have something to read for a few minutes. These are things I would gladly spend my days doing. However, monetizing this passion is something I think will never happen, partly because of my current geographical location, but mostly because of my current inexperience.

I've made a lot of mistakes in my life that I've been pondering recently. Bad decisions, mainly. Things that I decided years and years ago that I can look to as a contributing cause to my current economic state. Things that a 2010 Randall would punch a 2005 Randall in the face for doing, if given the opportunity to time travel. But that, I suppose, is the nature of growing older: learning from your mistakes.

As I beat myself up over the mistakes I've made in my life, I thought this would be a good song to think about. I bought a mandolin from Casey P. with the change in my pocket and wrote this song that very night. My son, Jonah, was about 3 months old at the time and he was certainly on my mind. I tend to avoid writing love songs or happy songs, simply because every time I try to they turn out incredibly cheesy. This one, somehow, made it through my embarrassment filter intact.



This was on the first Ghostbeard EP, Heard It on the Mountain. I double-tracked the vocals I did on it simply because I needed the vocals to be louder but was too inept to manipulate the single track without distorting it. Also, Lindsey sang on almost all the songs on this EP. It marks the first and last time she let me record her voice.

Miss What I've Known

One of the only luxuries of working a mindless, dead-end job is the 8 hours each day I get to listen to my iPod. There are a handful of albums that I find myself listening to every week, regardless of what mood I'm in. One of those happens to be Kelsey Waldon's new album Anchor in the Valley. Kelsey and I struck up a friendship over MySpace early 2009 and we toured together in July of that year. Ghostbeard would be hit or miss during that tour, but Kelsey was pretty much flawless every night. She's a real throwback to the classic country sound, but also is full of personality and clever lyrics; an amalgamation of Loretta Lynn and Neko Case. This song is called "Miss What I've Known."




Since I'm very interested in home recordings, here's a twofer today: A version of the song from an earlier EP, recorded in her basement.

Ah Oh Ah Oh

When I decided to propose marriage to my future wife, the first person I told was Kevin Thomas. Kevin and I lived about a mile from each other and spent every weekend together driving back and forth between Magnolia and Katy. I would spend a couple nights each week with him at the record store he was employed at, enjoying a pizza and playing numerous rounds of the game Uno. When I look back on that period of my life, my friendship with Kevin is one of the things I miss the most. He's been lost to the sands of time now, blown into a different world entirely, but at the time he had a recording project called See How They Fight Invisible Foes.





This song is beautiful and haunting, and typified most of what Kevin would write. Lo-Fi, bedroom recording at its best. Currently, he's involved in The Eastern Sea down in Austin, TX.

Hand

The high school that I attended had about 2500 students at the time I was there. My graduating class numbered around 580. I wasn't interested in being friends with any of them. I think the fact that I was an introverted kid with a large collection of wool ties that I wore to school was enough to narrow down the field of human interaction available to me. Of the 4 friends I had at my high school, there's only one I still speak to today on a regular basis. That man is Bryan Jay.

Bryan and I had Music Theory together and randomly struck up a friendship. We started writing music together and formed a band that never amounted to much more than some horrible recordings. Bryan has been pretty quiet musically the past couple of years, but he recorded a handful of songs under the moniker Woodshed Diaries. He has a deep, smooth singing voice that I'm insanely jealous of and would always write the most painfully sad song. This song is called "Hand."



Bryan also did a self-portrait of himself that I used for the very first Ghostbeard EP in 2008. So that cover gives you a good idea of what he looks like.

The circuitry is exaggerated, but the monocle is accurate.

Demons

This is another song that I recorded for The Monster I’ve Become concept called “Demons”. While a lot of what I’ve recorded is incredibly embarrassing to me, this song is one that I’m happy to play for people. This song (and album) marks the beginning of a new kind of songwriting for me that I think is more truthful, whereas I just wrote silly love songs in my teenage years. The basic premise of this song is that the things in my past that I’m ashamed of continually haunt me. No matter how hard I try to shake them, they always seem to push out any good in my mind and I’m left to dwell on my mistakes and shortcomings without being able to move forward. I let them take over.



I recorded this on my computer in February 2005, but it took a while to finish because I wasn’t sure what audio clip to put in it. I had picked out a few different ones to convey the idea of being overcome by a stronger force, but they didn’t really work. The Evil Dead, however, offered the perfect piece of dialogue to fit in with the idea and mood of the song. The dark undertones of this song, too, were a new direction in songwriting that I continue to utilize.

I recorded this using Cakewalk Sonar 2.0. Again, using a keyboard to make the drum beat and plugging the guitar directly into my sound card. To get the feedback, I plugged my acoustic-electric into the sound card, put it right in front of the speakers, and turned up the gain. The fast piano-key was mapped using Cakewalk’s midi instruments. I think they’re 64th notes, much quicker than I could play.

Hail to the king, baby.

Nostalgia

Some future members of Ghostbeard, circa 2002, after enjoying a slice of pizza.

The very night this photo was taken I began courting my future wife, Lindsey. To this day, I’m amazed she took anything I said as being sincere. I looked like an Amish clown.

The Monster I've Become

I recorded this song around October 2004 in my apartment. At the time, I ran my electric guitar through a distortion pedal and into a Realistic brand mixer which plugged into the sound card on my computer. For the drum beats I used a toy keyboard that I had owned since I was 9. I didn’t have a proper guitar slide, so I used a screwdriver instead.


This was the first song I recorded for a concept album I did called The Monster I’ve Become. The story was, get this, a man turning into a literal monster. But wait, it was a metaphor for me turning into a figurative monster. Pretty deep, huh?