new album finished

yeah, i've been working on an album for the last several months... a collaborative album with musical contributions by the clientele of the organization i've worked at for most of the past year and a bit, For the Love of Learning

now that I'm done there and focusing on universiticity, i've made the final push to "complete" the album, even though i could have easily spent another year refining all the tracks - but i gotta declare the thing done and move on... maybe i'll even start blogging again now - in words, even

but i figured, if i'm hardly writing anything on my blog lately, i might as well at least post some of the music i've been driving away at for a while now - two or three of the tracks are my own songs or compositions that feature rob keyes on guitar, or erin piatt on vocals, and stuff like that, so i'll link to them, cause they're the kind of tracks i would put up on here anyway, in the normal course of things...

some of the tracks are very much the property of the songwriters or lyricists themselves, so i probably won't post those on this blog, cause i don't know if it's cool with the authors, and i don't know if FTLOL would want me to just up and make the whole thing available - although, shhhh.... don't tell anybody... but it all IS in fact available, even before they've re-designed the album art! but that's a secret... between me my self-selected super-elite readership

Gower Street Jam (with Rob Keyes)
an instrumental that i put on cause there weren't enough songs, so it's sort of a slop art piece, but i liked how it turned out - gives a good sense of rob's live playing... even though it's not a live jam exactly - i had "tryppy keys" as a placeholder title, because of the keyboard track that i'd pre-recorded (and because it makes a stupid pun) - i got rob to play bass and then guitar to the track, live at the gower street church basement computer "lab" where we used to be before FTLOL moved to waypoints and then cookstown road

Taxing You (with Andrew Harvey)
the most recent song i've finished - lyrics from a poem i wrote, which i think the horsefly lit mag published a couple years ago, which was inspired by something that happened to my friend jennifer's oldest son while working at wal-mart - when FTLOL moved to waypoints, we had a social worker doing a placement with us, and he volunteered to give me some material to help with my collaborative album - that turned out to be a bassline which sounded like 3 chord punk to me, and fit perfectly with the melody i still had in mind that i'd use if i ever turned those words into a song... thus, a song was born - he also did some freaking out on guitar for me, using the little music room they had at waypoints, filled up with amps and axes - so every bit of guitar in that song is solely from that freak-out session, that was the challenge i set myself, and i think it creates a nice gritty cohesion, and also nicely de-popifies the sound, stylistically

and i'll post the lyrics, as is my custom, in case i didn't eq up the high end enough for you to hear the vox clearly:

yes yes, i'm taxing you
i'm taxing you for being an asshole
the government wasn't doing its job
i noticed when you got your third promotion

yes yes, i'm helping myself
the company has deep pockets
i know they can afford compensation
to me it's simply an ignoble obligation

swipe, swipe, another swipe
it’s another wrong partially righted
i want a new ipad, you want a new car
the taxes won't kill you but the price of gas will

so tired, i’ll take a cab home today
so here’s another ride on you
hope my entrusted ketamine-encrusted charge card
will get me back in time to watch tv
before i fall asleep, i’m so tired, did i tell you
i’m tired? it's true

yes yes, i was taxing you
you caught me with your video camera
you had to film me and good thing you did
justice has been served

you took it on yourself to film me
it wasn't company policy strictly
but you're your own man, a man of action
the superstore garden center vigilante

yeah yeah, put me away
i'm sure i'll learn a valuable lesson
i'll learn to use my fists instead of my brain
it wasn't working anyway