You are allowed to enjoy this…

I get easily distracted…what was it I was going to say? Anyway, sometimes I am doing one thing and then I end up going off on a tangent and doing something completely off-piste. For example, I am trying to write some more material for “L” but then I got to thinking about “Americana” – a concept album I did awhile back and some of the vocals for that I was never happy with. For example, the track “The Long Goodbye” was meant to have the devil singing to the lead character. It was the big finale, but I was never happy with the way it turned out. It wasn’t demonic enough. I should have gone with my gut instinct and used a pitch shifter on my voice to make it more like the horny red fellow from the movies Fantasia or Legend in an auditory sense, rather than me gurning my voice.

So off went to the digital Lock archive to dig out the master files and I’ve been plinking and plonking away, trying to make this last track sound more like the image in my head. And here we go, here is that track remixed and made more “demonic” that its original counterpart.

And to think, it’s only another two years until the ten-year anniversary of that collection and maybe its about time I finished the follow-up “Whatever Happened to Eddie Pilgrim?”

Anyway, here’s the rejiggered track for your enjoyment!

I am obsessed with virtual drum kits and whenever Toontrack have one of their weekend deals, I invariably end up splashing the cash for yet another fancy virtual drum kit for their Superior Drummer 3 plugin, which has been my go-to drum plugin for over a decade now.

This weekend was no exception as I bought their Classic SDX kit and so I used this kit as the basis of this track. My process is simple and streamlined these days. In Logic Pro X, I use the Drummer strip to lay down some grooves, I often double up here and have two loops playing off each other and then I use the Superior Drummer Plugin to add colour via the various kits I own in that plugin.

Sometimes, recording is a bit more formal, like when you are trying to record an actual song to lyrics or you have a specific idea. But there is also the “jam” process, where I lay down a rhythm track and just jam over it. I keep the chords and sequences pretty simple (but then my most of music is pretty simple, I’m a simple guy) and then keep jamming over the top of that stuff. Wait a minute, that’s how I record a lot of my stuff. This is often a starting-out point and sometimes ideas are developed from these jams. Sometimes the jams are clean enough to exist on their own as a song with minimal editing and fiddling with.

This is the jam I recorded in the early hours. It is pretty light and airy and almost captures the sap rising. Very spring-like and so while writing this paragraph, I have titled it “Spring Forwards”. So there you go…

Thought I should really use this blog I stopped engaging it many years ago because no-one was coming here and everyone was using social media, but this place belongs to me. I can post what I feel without fear of people trying to get me into trouble with the social media giants and accusing me of things I haven’t done or broken rules that are laughable non-enforced on some while others aren’t spared the social media rod.

Anyway, aches and pains. Today is a day of aches and pains. Not too bad but I awoke with my legs aching like I’d been walking all night. This is something that has afflicted me since around May 2019. It comes and goes and I can usually walk it off. But then the rest of my joints begin to hurt: knees, shoulders, elbows, knuckles, toes. Then there’s the feeling of exhaustion. So I am feeling that today, but it isn’t too bad. It’s not as bad as when I’m just curled up on the sofa sobbing and wondering if this is the future. Not that bad. But this is the way it is now.

On Saturday afternoons, we play board games as part of our year of board games championship. Today, it will be Speed Monopoly which is fast and fun and quite confusing if you aren’t paying attention. Twelve weeks in and it is a close competition, though Herb needs to desperately catch up, but the board games are teaching him how to lose and the tears and souvenirs have diminished very quickly. It’s helping him learn to be a better him; and that’s cool. But the women are dominating and I’m in third place. I’m banned from introducing Trivial Pursuit or Scrabble because of the unfair advantage. Oh well, at least it isn’t Operation, which caused the most consternation of the board games. I didn’t remember it being that hard as a kid.

The new collection of songs called “L” – to celebrate 50 years being a pain in the arse – keeps changing from one thing to another. It was meant to be finished on my birthday, but I’ve dropped a number of the tracks and making it a “singy song” only collection, so instrumentals have gone. I’m about one or two songs away from finishing again, but who knows, that might change again and again…

Toodles!

Lyrics:

It was so easy to understand
But as time has passed
All reason lost command
What was right is wrong
And what’s left is disconnected
How did this happen
This was not to be expected

Words lost their meaning
Subtlety extinct
Intelligence trumped by feeling 
Nuance indistinct
While there’s more communication
The less we talk
Put down the device and go out for a walk

Pick your side
Fight for glory
You need to be
On the right side of history

No room for discussion
No time for debate
Just push your narrative
And feed off the hate

Pick your side
Swallow the story
Justify your truth
Infinite digital purgatory

No room for reason
No time for facts
Just join the army
And carry out the attack

The age of the pointless
Communication has passed
The culture of cancel 
Its flag nailed to the mast
They eat themselves wholesale 
Safety in the circle jerk
Just another experiment that can never work

The media isn’t social
Unless you’re towing the line
The left think they’re right
And the right’s left behind
They’re both cheeks of the same stupid arse
Desperately wanting not to be left in the past

Pick your side
Fight for glory
You need to be
On the right side of history

No room for discussion
No time for debate
Just push your narrative
And feed off the hate

Pick your side
Swallow the story
Justify your truth
Infinite digital purgatory

No room for reason
No time for facts
Just join the army
And carry out the attack

So here’s the companion album to “2020 Vision” and it comprises of the bits that didn’t make it onto that record. The original idea was to have these ambient pieces be the connective tissue of “2020 Vision” that link the songs together and also reference material that appeared on previous recordings, a sort of musical echo of the past. But as I was working, I didn’t feel that concept worked and those bits got excised, but I thought they were too good to leave in the folder. There were also two tracks that found themselves unfinished and I recorded two more pieces to bring the CD up to time. I quite like this alternative version of “2020 Vision” and I like it that it is genetically related to the previous record. It’s cool in an understated way.

Enjoy!

In the olde days, I used to post my demos on this website and people could listen to them. I don’t know why I stopped because this should be the prime source of news about what I’m up to.

So let’s go back in time and let us return to the days where blogs were posted here instead of prostituting myself to social media.

This is something that I knocked up recently. Enjoy!