Shoebox Full of Tapes

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Hella Gems is a music weblog wherein each contributor posts new original music on a daily rotating schedule. There are twelve contributors, which means that if you are one of them, you get to write, record, and publish a song every twelve days. Now, I’ve been writing songs for six years or so, and in that time I’ve come up with, oh, ten or twelve that I think are good. And, y’ know, I’m happy about those. But at the rate that they’ve been going, a Hella Gems contributor would have written 180 songs. How dare I call myself a songwriter in the face of such prolificacy? These people put me to shame. Yesterday morning, though, I was given the opportunity to redeem myself: our good friend E. Robert Frank called up Alex and me and asked if we wanted to help him record an as-yet-unwritten song which was due on Hella Gems that night. “It’s sort of like Shoebox Full of Tapes,” Rob said, “except we update it more often.” Oh, snap!

I said we’d be happy to help, on the condition that if we liked what we came up with, I could also post it here on SFoT, and Rob readily agreed. (Of course, I was bluffing. I would be elated to rock out with Rob at any time without precondition.) So, around 7 p.m. last night, he showed up with a car full of instruments, and we brought them on in, set up, and futzed around for quite a while. To give you an idea of what a class act we were at that point in the evening, our idea of a “good” keyboard part was one that could be played with the backs of one’s fists while simultaneously flipping the bird at one’s bandmates and (notional) audience. Keepin’ it classy, us. Eventually, and without having actually recorded anything, we decided to go get Chinese food. At a restaurant a mile and a half away. On foot. This was all very enjoyable, of course, but by the time we got home again at 10 p.m., we had still made exactly no progress on our song, which had to be done by midnight Pacific time, which was now five hours away.

But then Alex picked up Rob’s acoustic guitar and started alternately playing E minor and D chords while Rob and I noodled on the drums and keyboard. And then I discovered that the pitch bend on Rob’s keyboard made a sound like a high-tech outer-space pedal steel, and somehow, from there, the whole thing began to come together. I spent about twenty minutes in the corner with a notebook (this is 180 degrees to how I usually operate when I write lyrics, and I don’t love what I was able to come up with in twenty minutes, but it had to be good enough, so here it is), and we played and played and sang and sang and mixed and mixed and with an hour to go before the deadline, we had finished the whole thing. Rob has already written about the process at length over on the Hella Gems blog, so I refer you to his post for most of the details.

I know I’ve missed a few months of updates this fall, and I’ll probably be calling an official hiatus pretty soon here, now that I’m in school and have less time to devote to things that are not directly related to getting my Ph.D. But I wanted to leave SFoT with something I was proud of, and here it is. If you’ve been listening to SFoT in 2008, thank you!

To celebrate Alex’s birthday today, he and I got a bunch of drums from craigslist, brought them home, set them up in a way that looked more or less right, and made a video of ourselves playing “Leaving Chicago”, just for you! The lyrics go like this.

It’s our nine-month anniversary, by the way. Yay!

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Embarrassingly, it took a lot longer for me to realize that the first song on Reconstruction Site is a sonnet than it took for me to write one.

Another day’s insistent rays incite
my grudging eyes to open, blurring red
dawn-glow with blood. I stumble from the bed;
I squint; I groan; I try to stand upright.
What drug, what magic spell makes sun less bright?
This water glass will have to do, instead.
One sip, and stars explode inside my head.
I blink; I stall; I drink it all in spite.
But when I’m done and set it down at last,
I see that it was magic all along:
a thousand rainbows dance across the wall.
The morning sun, refracting through the glass!
Both optimists and pessimists are wrong.
The glass, all empty, turns out to be full.

In 2004, by some unbelievable stroke of luck, my band got to play a show opening for John Vanderslice at Gardner Lounge. Gardner, if you’re not familiar, has a rich and Pabst-steeped history: the Smashing Pumpkins were there in 1990, opening for the Lemonheads on what I think must have been their first actual tour outside of Chicago; the Reputation played an eight-song set there in 2003 that launched my long love affair with them; the Mountain Goats came through last year. Every Gardner show is free, all-ages, and open to the public. Truly, we were standing on the shoulders of giants.

We kind of sucked.

But it’s okay! Because a month ago, I asked you a question: “Should I post an embarrassing video of my band on YouTube?” And you, dear reader, answered with a resounding “hell yes”. So here we are. And here we were:

And there you go. And because this is kind of a cop-out and not a real Shoebox Full of Tapes update, to tide you over until next time here’s another video in which I play music. Sort of.

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Except when I don’t. For example, I had forgotten that my band had played this in college, and it was just now that I managed to find this recording from 2004. Man, y’ know — I think we really weren’t too bad! I like this better than the 2006 version, in fact. That’s Tanny Phillips playing the guitar and JP Ramos playing drums, of course.

Now, the really important question: while I was digging through this old stuff, I also found an embarrassing video! of us playing this song at a Gardner Lounge show in 2004. In said video, I twitch around spastically and compress the pitch range of the song to two notes, “low” and “high”. So, my question for you is: do I put it on YouTube for all the world to see? Acceptable responses are “yes” and “hell yes”.

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Again with the Mountain Goats covers! I didn’t even know about “Twin Human Highway Flares” until I saw the band play it at a show in Chicago in 2005, two days before I moved. If you listen to the recording of that show and you get to this song and you notice sort of a heavy subsonic thump at about fifteen seconds in, well, that would be my jaw hitting the floor. Or possibly yours.

I think that that probably would’ve happened, hearing this song that night, even if I hadn’t lived the first 22 years of my life in eastern Iowa, even if I didn’t know those particular stretches of road and river cold, even if I didn’t know exactly what that sunset looks like. It sure didn’t hurt, though. Here are the lyrics. It’s on this album, which you should own, but really, you might try listening to that live version first.

Also, tonight’s Shoebox Full of Tapes is in honor of my sister, who turns 26 next weekend. She came to that show with me and (in between being chatted up by the sound guy) helped me scrape up the bits of my brain and get me home at the end of the night. She’s done this a few times, in fact. I love you madly, Maya.

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What happens when I’m listening to Atmosphere and Aesop Rock at the same time as I’m reading my own proto-song journal scrawl from 2005? Lyrics like this. I’m super-excited to have finally finished this thing I started nearly three years ago, especially since it’s now been nearly two and a half years since I really did leave Chicago.

The advertisement I mention in the song was real, by the way. (And so was my reaction.) The actual copy was “hundred thousandollaraire”, but that shit just doesn’t scan.

I just left work now, and it’s well past dark out,
but I won’t make it home
until I get what I came for: a record or eight more
to drive away the cold,
and a few hours later, my new fix paid for,
I’ll have to figure out
which way the lake is again, so I can make the last train,
and if by now we haven’t changed,
I must have it down in my freezing bones:
I’m leaving Chicago soon.
I can’t explain, but I know
I’ve got to make some changes in the kinds of places
I pass through every day,
and if I had some spray paint, I could start by changing
what the ads on this platform say.
“I’m a hundred-thousandaire” finds a hundred thousand stares
each night as we’re all detraining.
“Why am I paying commissions like a multimillionaire?”
Why don’t I erase the last five words and write “complaining”?
Down in my freezing bones,
I’m leaving Chicago soon.
I can’t explain, but I know
we tread these streets on unsteady feet,
carrying purses and bags,
and all of us in makeup applied so well,
we almost can’t tell we’re so sad.
From door to door and store to store,
we make the requisite rounds
so we can give each other presents that we know we won’t like,
and I guess I should’ve known
we were always trying to pull each other down
in my freezing bones.
I’m leaving Chicago soon.
I can’t explain, but I know.

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You must do the things you think you cannot do.Eleanor Roosevelt

There’s no way that this song could be played on anything but a guitar, so I borrowed one from my wonderful housemate and did this in one ridiculous take after looking up how to play three guitar chords. Also, the Internet at my house just died, and so I am posting this from a damp park bench in front of the neighbors’ place while stealing their wifi. Does it get any more punk rock than that? I ask you!

Alex, this is for you. It’s one of my favorite songs from one of my favorite albums, and I hope you love it as much as I do!

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As your New Year’s present from Atlanta, we bring the pop-punk.

• Alex J. Rudnick: drums, backup vocals, waffles
• E. Robert Frank: bass guitar, recording, mixing, mastering, coffee
• Yuna Wu: Casio VL-Tone mastery

And the original. Happy 2008!

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This is a new version of the original. I tried to tighten it up, tweaked some of the chords (thirds on the bottom! CRAZY), and even tried to incorporate Eric’s good suggestion. I started recording at 11:45 p.m. tonight, after going running with Alex and having dinner with Paul and making cookies and power-cycling the Firepod and panicking about how I couldn’t get sound to come out of it and panicking about how I was getting bad sounds to come out of it and it’s now 11:59 p.m. and I have not failed to bring you Shoebox Full of Tapes for the month of November. I haven’t really checked to see if this came out sounding okay after being filtered through a lot of technology I don’t understand, and this may be the least professional I’ve ever sounded in a SFoT update, but that’s okay because it doesn’t matter. Here, I made this. Here, it’s yours.

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And the Weakerthans original, of course. Thanks for listening.

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This happens all the time these days: I go back and listen to old stuff and I can’t believe how uncertain and hesitant I sounded then, or just how slow it is. Is that really how I used to play this? That’s really what people’ve been listening to all these years? Man! That’ll teach me to record stuff right after I write it. Jeez.

I’m sure that in a few years I’ll find this version just as appalling, but for now, here’s “You’re Beautiful” as it actually sounds. I’m pretty proud of this song. Not everything I wrote in 2003 I still think is worth keeping, but with this I think the songwriting has actually held up, if not the performance.

Thanks for listening!

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Derksen writes: “I ask the question that I am fairly certain most artists dread to hear: how much of this stuff is personal (ie has a direct bearing on your life in a tangentially autobiographical sort of way), and how much of it is just something that felt right, a fiction of the sentimental?”

For the record: all of this stuff is personal. That doesn’t mean that it’s word-for-word true, but fiction does a remarkably good job of telling the truth sometimes, you know?

I was a little astonished, today, going back and listening to how this sounded a year and a half ago. I used to actually sound like that? You people actually listened? Man.

Redeciding hourly if you’re self-aware:
All angles, eyelashes, worn-out shoes, torn-up hair,
but sometimes, with things you say,
by chance or design, but either way, I guess,
I try to catch the edge to every inside joke you make

Explicating riddles in the words you choose:
Hesitate a little, so I know you thought them through
as much as I will
And I’ve heard the others wonder what it is with me and you
Well, let them wonder more
I’ve been wrong before, but they have, too

Glitching live heartskips we both pretend to concentrate
These days, who cares?
What’s maturity, anyway,
but a string of recent scars
from each miscue that got us this far?
And I’m glad you know me well,
but I wish you couldn’t tell I try this hard

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One of the first things my boyfriend, Indigo, did after we started dating six months ago was give me the Maus books to read. There isn’t a lot I could say about these that hasn’t already been said more eloquently, so I won’t try to say a lot. But what especially amazed me when I got to the second volume was the way that the artist’s own story of having worked on the first volume had now woven its way into the second’s story. “And normally all the self-referential nonsense would have really bothered me,” a blogger who could have been me writes, “but that is the beauty of Maus. The self-referential stuff is what keeps it honest and grounded. It is what keeps it from becoming another Holocaust survival story and makes it into something much, much larger. It is what makes it so amazing.” Honest and grounded is all I’m ever trying for as an artist, and reading and loving these books has helped me figure out that maybe self-conscious, self-referential writing can serve that purpose instead of getting in its way. But anyway, here’s what I’ve been working on for the last six months.

No, don’t get up
I just need a pen before I lose this line
I left my notebook at home again
This happens every time
I gotta wake up and write this down
This ought to make a good start:
“Maybe we can’t stay together,
but it’s not enough to keep us apart”

Six a.m.
My flight gets in
Of course I’m still awake
I went through all of my paper when
The sleeping pills didn’t take
Stretch, like a bass string, from the inside
Learn as I go along
Maybe we’re both out of practice,
but I’m working on a new song

No, don’t get up
I just need a rhyme for ’self-referentially’
I know my timing is terrible –
so, what time should we meet?
Not like I ever understood what the use is
of giving up before we start
You’re pretty good with excuses,
but it’s not enough to keep us apart

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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!