Tuesday, August 31, 2021

"Earful" Video!

 

This may be the last video for a while as I need to turn my attention to other matters.  Don't worry though as more music is coming, and more videos down the line.  This one was fun to make, though I couldn't persuade my dad to appear in it with his hearing aid ear.  Well, maybe another time.  Of course, ears are the motif, along with speaking.  I like the bees and flowers shot here.  I saw a really cool lightning bug/bee insect (a lightning bug and a yellowjacket had sex maybe and had a baby?  I don't know, but that's what the thing looked like), but it was after I was done with the video, so I didn't record it (fortunately, this guy did:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fe21MD1vtns), so I'm not the only one who's seen this crazy bug (if you know what it is, please drop a line).

For more fun, read Edna's Employment Agency!

Sunday, August 15, 2021

New Recording!: "Earful"

This song is probably more identified with The GoGoBots, but I wrote it while in Yeast? and Yeast? recorded it.  After this one, we'll be firmly in The Hot Glue Guns (protoGoGoBots) and GoGoBots era.  I think I wrote it about a friendship which was decaying but then turned it into more of a portrait of a romantic relationship decaying.  It wasn't autobiographical as I was quite happy with the romantic relationship I was in at the time, but it did become a bit prophetic that way eventually.  Initially, the chorus was "Why do you tell me things I don't want to hear?" but that seemed too whiny, so I reversed the pronouns by the time The GoGoBots played it, and that is how it has stayed over the years (of course, just like nearly anytime someone tells you that it's them and not you, they're generally fibbing; it's usually you).  For the recording, I didn't screw up and have to dedicate two tracks to an instrument, so I celebrated by having two weird instruments.  For the first, I used a pipe organ drone underneath the singing, and for the second, I did some background vocals by yelling them across the room at the microphone (an earful, you know).  The recording came out pretty well.  It has the usual background hum from using a cheap Radio Shack microphone circa 1999, but I always liked bands such as Pavement and Guided By Voices, so a little extra noise doesn't bother me.  Maybe someday, I'll shell out for a good microphone.  I might take some of these rerecorded tracks and put them together for an album of sorts.  I think there's enough tracks I like now and which seem to go together.  I doubt I'll do vinyl; it'll probably just be a Soundcloud playlist or something, but it will be fun to make a collection of them and debate different track orders and stuff.  Anyway, hope you enjoy listening and as I did recording.

To hear more music, get the Dick Bennett ep.

Sunday, August 1, 2021

"Bebopped" Video!

 

For a song based on a dream, I wanted to use some dreamlike images, so this is a strange video.  There are cat buddies, Miles Davis albums, Lego projectors, barber poles, crickets, a Philip Larkin essay, and more oddities.  I almost got a shot of a coyote, but he or she was camerashy and slipped off into the woods before I could get any good footage.  The weird bug is a stink bug.  Very cute, but apparently a pain for a garden, so I had to deport him to the woods and away from the mulberry tree.  

On another note, it looks like Google ended their Google Reader feed.  I can still get to individual blogs, but it no longer displays the latest posts in one handy feed.  Some of the blogs I follow haven't posted in years, so it's no great loss, but I did enjoy keeping up with the more consistent blogs I followed.  I will try to stop by once in a while.  Please do the same if you got hit by the same bit of "progress".  Google's free, so I can't much complain, but the Internet seems to be getting a little crappier with all the censorship and spying lately and the progress which isn't progress (for example, I gave up selling on Amazon because it wasn't worth the hassle when I could just sell on eBay and elsewhere without having to constantly contact customer service and go around with them for days just to list a book for sale--and the only reason I used Amazon was that I could list the books quickly in the past.  It seemed as if they were trying to shake out the smaller sellers by design, though they claimed they were just trying to improve the selling experience--I guess giving both buyers and sellers fewer choices is an improvement when one wears monopoly glasses).  At this rate, I may just end up going offline and doing zines again (assuming the post office still exists by then).  Ha!  With luck, the Internet will spin itself a better Web again because it used to be really great before it got all Big Brother creepy. 

For more fun, read Edna's Employment Agency!