“A Hole in Everything” – Co-Writing Session
That’s a working title for a new song with lyrics by me and Jen.
Co-writing continues to be an enjoyable (if sometimes weird) experience for me. This time it was with Jen, and we finished a song I’ve been working on for almost two years. I had a first verse, and then every time I tried to write a second verse, I just couldn’t come up with anything good.
So I played Jen the first verse (and chorus). It was a pretty bare bones character sketch of two people with very different personalities.
I know you were the kind
to be always one branch higher
Anything to be at the top of the tree
And I was the tongue-tied boy
Rooted and grounded and bored
Maybe a broken arm was all I need
Somewhat ironically, it was Jen who pushed for it to be more of a story, so we talked about what kind of relationship between the characters was implied by what was already written, and then something really fun occurred to us: we made it a duet, which is not something we’ve done ever. This opened up an entirely new way to explore the song, because now instead of one person talking about himself and someone else, it was two people talking about the other person.
Male character:
I know you were the kind
to be always one branch higher
Anything to be at the top of the tree
Female character:
When I finished my climb
I knew I was a flier
My heart wanted much more than you and me
Second verse:
Female character:
Always biting your tongue
You played helpless and quiet
Clinging to restraints you were chained to the ground
Male character:
I was the tongue-tied boy
Rooted and grounded and bored
Maybe a broken arm was all I need
I’m quite pleased with what came out. “Miscommunication” is good fodder for stories. Jen commented that the net result is that there’s a disconnect between them, some breakdown in compatibility and their basic ability to even understand each other to work past it. There’s also an interesting psychological bit with the way the narrators construct their sentences: his lines start have “I” as the subject even when talking about the other person; hers use “I” to talk about herself and “you” to talk about the other person.
Jen is better than I am at actually saying what “she” (or her narrator) means, and also seems to have a much easier time being completely open and honest about her own personal experience, so it’s a good foil to my tendency to be oblique sometimes to the point of obscurity. Her willingness to throw every idea out there really helped put me at ease for the session. Mostly I was relegated to rewording things slightly to maintain the rhyme scheme and rhythm, but lyrically it’s a true collaboration now.
The song has a chorus, and we did some fun vocal things with the harmonies, but I’ll save talking about those for when we have a recording of some sort.
-Jon
Practice makes … all your songs sound different
If anyone’s wondering (all eight of you!) why I haven’t blogged in a while — well, I have. It’s just that I’m blogging in two places now, here and on “my” blog.
Joe Scala and I got together today to work on a few of the FAWM songs linked to in the last post.
It’s peculiar reworking songs for a band without everyone present: You get these weird gaps in the rhythms and music where you want someone to play a drum fill or you need a lot of extra noise and it’s just not there. Then you have to resist the temptation to add it all back in before hearing it in context with everyone else. Then you have awkward moments like this:
“Okay, this is the piano solo. Count out twelve bars and then we come back in. No, don’t play on those twelve bars, just count them out in your head. Piano solo. Solo solo. Okay, maybe some drums. And your guitar is NOT a drum.”
“Jon, you started too early. That was only 10 bars.”
“No, it was twelve.”
“Well, then, stop speeding up while you play.”
“It wasn’t me! the piano player sped up!”
And according to Joe, I don’t write “two-guitar songs,” which is probably true. Even though a piano fills a lot more sonic space than a guitar, it’s just not the same thing: A guitar can’t play complicated bass lines or really high tinkly parts, and just having another set of strings makes things sound more homogeneous. Or maybe I’m just not good at staying out of other peoples’ way.
But it was a good practice. “What Kind of Heart Beats (In the Black Breast of the Beast)” was very easy to translate; the piano sounds good in it, and the bass was a very easy addition. Joe’s “Grounded” is also sounding spiffy. We rewrote some of the chords, and I can actually play some bass on it for Joe. It’s also fun having some songs written by other people in the band in the works. It’s something we tried to make happen a bit in the past, but I didn’t spend time rearranging them to our sound, so they were always slightly out of place. “The Language of Flowers” is going to sound awesome as soon as we have that piano solo down.
We also worked on two more Joe songs: “No Man (is an Island)” (he started playing this live last summer when we did the “triple solo” show at Bread and Circuses) and “Just a Taste” (one of his best from FAWM 2012), and a couple more of mine that still need some work.
No recordings from this session, but we may post a few demos if we get something good.
FAWM wins … and So Long To Tim :(
FAWM
Some of you may remember — if you were following our blog or Facebook this time last year — that Joe Scala did February Album Writing Month (FAWM) last year. I still listen to what he made every once in a while — it was an amazing achievement. Well, he did it again this year, and he convinced me to do it, too. And we both completed the challenge, writing 14 songs apiece, one of which is a collaboration between the two of us, the first of what we hope to be many.
Some linkses to the new songs
I wrote a little blog post wrapping things up, with videos of what I thought were the strongest songs from my challenge, on my personal web site. Rather than repost the whole thing here on the Midway Fair site, please hop on over and have a listen to some songs that might appear in our set list in the future.
Joe blogged about each song he wrote, and has a soundcloud player for the whole album.
Here’s our FAWM pages, where you can see all the songs in one place:
http://fawm.org/fawmers/midwayfair
http://fawm.org/fawmers/joetime
Other News
Many of you are friends with members of Midway Fair, either online or in real life, so you may be aware, but there hasn’t been an official announcement: Tim Taormino has decided to leave Midway Fair for other pursuits (mainly being a dad). Tim was a bedrock of the band for three years, and his decision, though understandable and not entirely surprising in the circumstances, was still a pretty hard blow. We’ll begin the search for a new drummer in the coming months.
We do plan on hitting up the studio in the fall to record some new material, including the song “Most Distant Star,” which I think is one of our absolute best.
-Jon
Midway Fair’s Recordings Are Now Creative Commons
Midway Fair’s recordings now fall under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. You can read more about what on earth that means by clicking that link!
And you can read more about my decision to do this on my personal web site. It seemed a little heavy to go into here. http://jonpattonmusic.com/blog/
Cheers,
Jon
Joe Scala Finishes February Album Writing Month!
Our bassist, Joe Scala, spent the month of February not only playing some shows with us and learning a slew of new material for the St. Pattrick’s Day show, but writing and recording an entire 14-song album from scratch. Have a listen, then pop on over to FAWM.org to read the liner notes on the songs.
In the studio: Silent Little Bells
Jon's feet.
This session was an exercise in letting go.
During the Distance sessions, we were as meticulous as possible: Every song was done to a click track (a metronome, to keep time), we overdubbed each instrument and voice in isolation, and this gave us control over every note, passage, and line in the songs. It let us copy and paste parts to create loops and layers, and it made for a pristine record. At times it’s too pristine. I joked with Chris during the mix down that the next session would be the garage rock album.
We recorded the tracks mostly live—no click track, no isolated instruments, so all the bass and guitar and drum parts are bleeding into the microphones. We did overdub some vocals, mostly because there aren’t 12 of us for a choir, but also because we didn’t have any more microphones or inputs on the board, so Joe had to sing his parts afterward.
At one point we did try playing to a click track. This was very frustrating in that I tried using the loop function on my delay pedal and discovered that I’m not a robot. Eventually we scrapped it and just played the songs like we’d practiced. We did fix a couple things here and there, fixed a lyric here and punched in a couple notes—I’ve never pretended to be flawless—but for the most part, what you hear is what we did at the time.
Here’s what we used, for any curious gearheads:
Jon: My red telestrat on “Silent Little Bells” and my friend Keith’s Gibson ES-135 on “It Started Well.” Effects: Hartman Compressor, El Capistan, volume pedal, Germanium OD, Malekko Ekko 616, and a Vox wah. Amp: Fender Hot Rod Deluxe miced with a Royer. I also play a glockenspiel in this song, but, uncharacteristically, I don’t want to disclose what we did to it.
Vocal mic is a Shure SM-7, which was also used for all vocal overdubs.
Jen: Roland RD-700, direct into the console. I think her vocal mic was an AKG.
Joe: Epiphone Viola bass into a 100-watt Ampeg head. I don’t remember what it was miced with, but it might have been another Shure.
Tim: We used Chris’s drum kit, which is a hodgepodge of stuff with Zildjian cymbals. The snare is a black beauty that Tim donated to the studio during the Distance sessions.
There are multiple room mics surrounding the drum kit.
We're bringing our friends Miss Shevaughn and Yuma Wray to Baltimore for the first time. We played a bunch of shows with them over the summer. Oh, and here's your chance to get a copy of that poster McKinzie Lefstein made for us!
Back in the studio
So this is a bit of a surprise—I thought we’d be staying out of the studio this year, but we really got the bug to record Heather Aubrey Lloyd’s “Silent Little Bells,” so we’ll be heading out to Woodstock again to work with Chris Freeland in early November. We’ll also be rerecording an outtake from the sessions for The Distance of the Moon at Daybreak, “It Started Well,” which has only rarely been performed in public (and never as a full band). We’ve worked out a funky little drum beat and some unusual guitar sounds to go with Dylan-y lyrics, a jazzy progression, and a lot of local character.
“Silent Little Bells” will be the a-side, though. It’s an absolutely killer song by a local songwriter, and we haven’t played it in public as a full band yet, so the Joe Squared show will be everyone’s first opportunity to hear the full arrangement. I’m really excited about this song. It’s the song that actually got me into the idea of covering songs by local songwriters, and I’m not the only one around town who plays it, either, so I know it’s not just me. I’m really proud that we’ll be able to share it with our little corner of the world.
Okay, enough of the hype. Because there’s something else, besides recording our first cover, that’s a bit of a departure for us:
We’re not going to post this one publicly where everyone can listen to it. We’re not going to sell it. We’re going to give it away to people just for being on our mailing list. (There’s a link in the top right of our website to sign up, or you can click here, if you aren’t already on it.)
At some point that may have to change. There’s an upper limit to how many people can be on our mailing list before it starts costing us money we don’t make, and I have to pay Heather Lloyd for each copy of the song people download, so if for some reason we end up with one of those “first world problems” where too many people are downloading the song, I might have to put it up on iTunes or Amazon or something.
Oh, the EP will have a subtitle: Baltimerica 1. That should map out what’s going to be happening over the next year or so.
Joe Squared mini release show
So Dec. 9 will be our release show for the single/mini-EP, whatever you like to call it. We’re bringing our friends Miss Shevaughn and Yuma Wray to town. Spectacular vocals from Miss Shvaughn, and some big guitar sounds and a kickdrum provided by her partner Yuma Wray. We played a few shows with them over the summer, and it’s great to get them to our hometown. We’re talking with some friends about adding a third group, so we’ll let everyone know who that is once we know for sure.
Oh, right, a video
Anyway, this post also promised some video from our Cellar Stage show with the Kennedys. The show went great—we fit in pretty well with the headliners (who played a Fairport Convention song AND a Richard Thompson song), and we made a bunch of new friends. Hopefully we’ll be able to go back someday … maybe even with the full band. Paul Demmitt shot this video of our new song (pardon the incorrect song title):
