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“Down the Hill (The Puppy Dog Song)”
It’s springtime in San Antonio. Carly and I rolled tape while we were learning this tune. We hope you like it.
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#24 “Alicia”
So much for 52 songs this year. I’ll dole the blame out to a piano bar and the love of a woman. I came out with some good raw material and I don’t have any regrets. Go to hell everyone. Not really.
I recorded this demo for Andrew, so I thought I’d post it. Alicia is a song I began writing in the haze of my senior year of college, when I was sad and drunk and successful and manic with heartbreak. It’s a sour-grapes ode to an unromantic, comfortable relationship. Come to my show on Thursday at 1011, please.
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#23 “Impromptu Du Monde”
This story sounds like a lie but I swear it’s true.
When I first toured with We Leave at Midnight, I didn’t play the band, I just acted as tour manager and drank John’s whiskey. I met up with the band for the Houston show at Super Happy Funland (see week #1, “Clouds Roll In”). Our next stop was in New Orleans, for Mardi Gras.
Mardi Gras was unseasonably early, and unseasonably cold. Dave and Katie’s house was full, so Cris, Tito, John, Adam, Megan and I spent the first night sleeping in the van (Mona). We all drank enough pint whiskey to make the first night of sleeping bearable, but we all agreed that if we could secure accommodations for one of the party, the rest would sleep more comfortably in the van. At a bar called The John on Frenchman street, well past what Texans and Pennsylvanians consider closing time, our opportunity arose.
Tito and I were sitting at a table. Poor poor Cris was whiskey drunk, passed out on the bar, getting his back rubbed by a gay man in a Tiger suit (those familiar with Mardi Gras practices will think that is slightly less weird than anyone who is unfamiliar, but still, it’s a good story, not for sharing at this particular juncture). A girl entered the bar and approached my table and promptly told me I was beautiful (truth is stranger than fiction). She introduced herself as Alex. Adam, ever the conniving businessman, immediately began pimping me out to sleep at her place. My advances towards Megan were falling flat, so I embraced the opportunity to ahem, know someone while I was at Mardi Gras.
Alex was a strange, sad creature. She demanded drugs, namely prescription drugs, to repay her for housing me. When we told her that we couldn’t help her, she still begrudgingly took me on, under the understanding that I was to give her cigarettes and buy her drinks for the rest of the night. I agreed. She also added one more caveat: the two of us, Alex and Alex, were to pretend to be in love. At 3 o’clock in the morning, I could provide all of these things.
The two of us walked arm and arm around the fringes of the French quarter, buying drinks and smoking cigarettes. Alex was an artist, tremendously depressed, and like me at the time, believed that she wouldn’t last much longer. Our fake love proved to be a dark and dismal one, talking about past loves, failing dreams, debt, and depression.
She led me to her house, far past Frenchman from the quarter. She shared the house with several men whom I never met. The room smelled like mildew, and the doors to other rooms were broken from the hinges or missing panels. Her art filled the first room. It was obsessively detailed, every inch of the images pained over, worked over, all portraits of her sister, looking away. We slept next to each other on a daybed. Sleeping with her was far more cold than the van could ever be.
I woke up the next day with one contact ripped in half from my eye and a dead phone. I shot up and turned the dew-wet lock and began the journey back to the van.
I think about Alex every now and then when I’m in New Orleans, I wonder if she’s still alive; I would assume I’ll never see her again. I think about her art, more complimentary than perfect images of someone she loved, obsessively detailed in a way skewed by her own brain. The pictures were not her sister, just her perception of her. I thought of the songs I have written, performed but yet to be recorded, songs not included in this collection, but hopefully songs that will be recorded soon, and I felt I could relate. I flatter myself.
The title is derived from Fantasie Impromptu by Chopin, which I lifted the chords from, crudely pared with the famous New Orleans cafe, Café du Monde. The percussion is hand drumming on my keyboard stand.
10 months ago - 
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#22 “Amidst the Madness”
This song was recorded on Chris Maddin’s piano at the Home Haus. It’s inspired by a nightmare I had while I was sleeping on my side, some bastard stabbing me in the ribs, a story told with pictures, most memorably a skeleton-faced matador mariachi band, all with the feeling that it had something to do with my last show at World Cafe Live. I got some ideas from the devil’s ball from Master and Margarita, the novel from which this blog derives it’s name. The song is a story told with pictures about anxious party guests in a hot summer house waiting to hear a famous lady sing, but they’ll be waiting, because she’s had a bit too much to drink.
This song needs some work but I think it could be good. You’ll hear from me again before the weekend is over.
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#21 “Beach or Bayou”
I just got back from vacation from the Outer Banks and New Orleans. Get it?
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#20 “My Best Friend”
Tonight’s my last day playing the Howl at the Moon in Charlotte. I’m gonna miss these fuckers.
This song is about how much of a possessive, stubborn shithead I was in high school (despite my efforts to rationalize my intentions and my actions) and how I absolutely deserved everything that came my way. Now I’m definitely older, hopefully wiser, and have more respect for the people close to me now. Probably.
The piano was recorded on Katie and Dave’s piano in New Orleans, and the vocals were recorded in room 932 of the Holiday Inn in downtown Charlotte, computer on the toilet, and me sitting on the floor. Pretty romantic, eh?
Enjoy, and thanks for listening. I miss all of you back home, wherever that may be.
11 months ago - 4
4 Uppers, in New Orleans
After the ten hour drive to New Orleans (during which I learned how to drive stick, well, well enough to get on and off the highways; my sister is a saint for teaching me, as well as putting up with my panicky lashing-out and anger; she tried to teach me and after struggling with a hill, I quit, and became very angry and combative, and then we took a short nap in the car in some shade off a dirt road, and then I woke up composed and ready to tackle the challenge of doing something potentially dangerous that I didn’t feel completely comfortable doing, and successfully got on the highway with no incident, which really made me feel capable and handy, like I just built a birdhouse or something; also, William Faulkner is my favorite author, did you notice?), safe, settled, teeth brushed on Phil’s (gone to California) bed in Katie and Dave’s house, I felt the poison coffee-energy drinks course through my veins; the clown hanging out at the party, long after his act is done.
And as I lay here, still now, probably miles away from a restful sleep, I am thoroughly enjoying being back on the road, with my sister, seeing those half-hour friends that stay with you so much longer, seeing different scenery, breathing different air, I feel happy and anxious with anticipation for what the world holds for me. Knoxville tomorrow, then three days playing piano bar in Charlotte. I love San Antonio but I’m far from missing it right now.
Bo Burnham says, “When life gives you lemons, you probably just found lemons,” but I think you should probably make lemonade anyhow. Anyway, in my caffeinated state, I wrote a bunch of words, I hesitate to call it poetry because it’s not very creative in terms of meter or rhyme scheme, but fuck, I’ll twist it around some chords and it’ll be an ok song. Here goes:
You clean my dirty face, wipe the dribble from my chin.
You dazzle me to no end with your conversation.
Your the belle of every suare, the toast of every glass.
My friends they all adore you, sly humor, careless class.
Food when I am hungry (how considerate!)
coffee when I’m tired, a bed when I am sick,
and the love you give to me is all you ask in return;
then why tell me why dear am I compelled to run?
When I am hungry, road weary and worn,
clothed to no vocation, and loveless and alone:
why then do I smile? why do I make myself at home?
and run across a thousand miles to no destination?
So if you feel so inclined,
would you, darling, run me down?
I’m constantly distracted, teeth grinding in my sleep,
I’m so aware of dying, oh my anxiety!
I want to make something something that lasts longer than me.
For most that is a child, well me I want to scream,
a scream that makes a mark on a printed page
and the poor ears of a child, who opens his throat and says,
“This is what he told me, but this is what I think I’ll tell
to all who will listen and wish to speak as well,”
and dear you make me forget my fragile mortal form.
Your love is like medicine but poison does much more
in terms of my allegiance to the pen and a page,
my lungs, my skull and ivory, a mechanism pounding strings,
so if I’m distant, running for the shore
to dive and drown in an ocean tears and piano roar
know that you are faster and much stronger than I.
Pull me down with violence in the ebbs of the tide.
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#19 “I Think I Got Something”
Sorry for the wait, I’ll spare you some details. Suffice it to say the next eight recordings will be a little more rough around the edges, and I’ll be back on track by the end of the month, which will put me at my halfway point!
Writing songs, the glory of creation, taking your life and mushing into a melody and twisting it over chord changes, whoa what fun! This is a song I came up after hearing Zach Galifianakis noodle on a piano in a comedy documentary. Seriously.
I think this song is about a dying songwriter who gets a great idea for a song on his deathbed and then dies before the idea ever gets to manifest. I felt the mania of creation when I wrote it (fairly quickly) that I felt in my senior year of college, when I wrote the last Perkasie record (most of which was never recorded, hopefully it becomes the first Black Magic record). It feels like I’m never going to record that record, which is terrifying to me. So I gotta do it right? I can’t be like the guy in the song, waiting for his band.
Another fun thing about writing songs is just getting them out there, recording them, and then listening later and try to figure out what the hell you meant.
This song has a swear word, 2 vocal tracks, and a piano track, recorded on my mac book mike onto GarageBand. I have a little crush on this song, I hope you enjoy it.
11 months ago - 3
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#18 “Firing Line”
I had a dream last night that Kate and I had a chance encounter. The mood was cordial and we decided to have coffee to talk about music and life. She told me not to make the old album with my new band. She also told me that she’s kept up with my work on this blog and she didn’t think the songs were that good. I told her that’s why I needed to make the old album. She agreed the old songs were good. I was confused. Then I woke up.
It was a strange dream, and it really came out of no where. It was like a dream about a ghost, except I’m the ghost.
There was more to the dream, but I forget. I think there was a water gun fight in there somewhere, but I digress.
The song this week has three mono drum tracks, six vocal tracks, and an acoustic guitar. I wrote the lyrics intuitively as I recorded, so they don’t make a whole lot of sense. It’s hardly a finished product, but I like the sound and there’s plenty of ideas to work with. Enjoy.
1 year ago - 1
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