Roll Over

My morning commute was one for the ages. More accurately it was a suck for the ages.

I was on my way to our Foxborough office which is about 74 miles from home. I was on route 495 South and I was making excellent time. I was 4.5 miles away from work at about 8:25am or so with my GPS giving me an ETA of about 8:35 when the traffic in front of me stopped. Stopped dead. Boom. I was a little more than two miles from my exit onto route 95 North.

50 minutes later I still hadn’t reached my exit. I was inching toward exit 33A when what I wanted was a little further away, exit 33B. Unfortunately it was right at 33A where the huge ass dump truck had rolled over. The small portion of the highway that wasn’t blocked by the truck was completely blocked by all of the dirt that spilled out of it. Route 495 was closed and traffic was detoured onto route 95 South. That was the highway I wanted, but it was in the wrong effing direction.

All of that detoured traffic turned 95 South into a parking lot. Everyone tried to get off and turn around at the first exit which caused a two mile backup and utter gridlock. My GPS told me to turn around at the third exit which almost melted my brain. Once I reversed course and was on 95 North, where I wanted to be, it was gridlocked again as everyone tried to get back on 495 South past the accident site.

Instead of getting to the office 20–25 minutes early, which was the pace I was on before reaching the accident, I got to work 45 fucking minutes late.

You can read about the highway closure here, but it doesn’t come close to expressing how completely and utterly infuriating the entire experience was. Oh, what a fun way to start my fucking day.

2026 50/90 Challenge Day 54/90

I hit a bit of a milestone yesterday. Day 54 had the potential for being shut out with no progress on the ol’ 50 songs in 90 days challenge thing. Fortunately I was able to get a couple of things done. (Spoiler alert for day 55, today, I have about a 99.999% chance of getting shut out)

Before work I sat in my car in the parking lot outside of my office and squeaked out a few bass/drum riffs. No song form yet, just a few 8-bar phrases. I grouped them together as song idea number 49. I thought that would be it for the day and it almost was.

At bed time last night (similar to day 53) I sat up in bed with my iPad and felt inspired with a new little idea. by 10:20pm I had a whole song form worked out with bass and drums down and two tracks of MIDI guitars to act as guides for when I record the real guitars. If the thing I came up with before work was song idea number 49 then logically this second thing must be song idea number 50, right? Correct. My 50 songs in 90 days pipeline officially has 50 songs in it. Granted, 13 of those songs are in various stages of incomplete ranging from pretty much done to barely started, but there are 50 ideas in total.

I’m trying to remember but I think I have finished this challenged three times. The first time I got exactly 50 songs. The second had 51 and the third had 52. I have to check the old playlists to verify that, but I think that’s how it worked out. Should I stop at 50 this time? Should I stop at 53 to continue the trend? Should I shoot for 60? 70? I still have over a month to go… should we turn this into a how-many-songs-can-I-write-and-record-in-90 days challenge?

One More Day

I have to work in the office 40% of each month. I didn’t go in at all for the first half of the month because I was under the weather and stuff. I had to squeeze it all in during the last two weeks. 

Tomorrow, when I work in the office, I will reach my 40% for August. Oh what a freakin’ relief that will be. My desk is 45 miles from my house and that is brutal. Worse, twice this week (yesterday and tomorrow) I will be working in a different building that is 74 miles from home. Yeah, you read that correctly. 74 miles.

I made that drive yesterday for some meetings that I wanted to attend in person. I will do it tomorrow because that building is very close to a venue where I will be attending a concert after work. Yup, Robbie’s going to a rock and roll show.

I started listening to King’s X in 1990 when they had a sort of almost hit record called “It’s Love.” Great song, out of this world vocals with ridiculous three part harmonies, and a shredding guitar solo that made all of those obnoxious hair bands from the ‘80’s look like talentless chumps. 

I thought about buying the album the song came from. I read a review in a guitar magazine that really surprised me. It basically said the band’s previous album was great but the new one, the one the article was acutally reviewing, kinda sucked. Based on the one song I knew I found that really hard to believe so I decided to ignore the advice and buy the record anyway. 

The next time I was at a record store they didn’t have the new album but they did have the previous album (on cassette, not CD) so I bought it. It was called Gretchen Goes to Nebraska and it was great. It was awesome. It was outstanding. Looking back I feel lucky that I bought that record first because when I eventually did get the record I wanted to buy in the first place… well… it kinda sucked. A few good songs, a few mediocre songs, a few terrible songs with lyrics that made me want to punch the band members in their friggin’ faces (if you know this band and this record then you know which song I’m talking about).

It was okay though, Gretchen was so good that I could overlook the shitty stuff in favor of the good stuff. A few years later they released an album called Dogman that was better than Gretchen. A few years later there was an album called Tape Head that was just as good. Those three records alone justify this band’s entire existance. Every record is good, even the couple of bad ones they’ve released over the years. As musicians, they might be the best band in the world. As lyricists… they are great instrumental performers. Yeah, they often rub me the wrong way. Religion and politics… the two things they tell you not to argue about… yeah. Sorry guys.

Anyway, I’ve been a fan since 1990 and I’ve never seen them live. The three band members ages range from 64 to 75 (I Googled it before I wrote this post just to make sure) and the days are probably numbered. The drummer almost died of a heart attack a few years ago and I thought I missed my chance to see them live. 

I had no idea they were touring but Spotify, of all things, told me they had a show in Massachusetts coming up and I bought a ticket. I didn’t ask anyone to go with me because I don’t know anyone else who likes them. That’s okay. I will work down the street from the venue and casually wander over when the doors open. I’ve never been to this place before. I don’t know if its a small theater or a bar or what. I’ll find out when I get there. I’ll bring my point and shoot camera because the guitar player has been known to play some seriously cool gear and I am a guitar gear junkie. I might be easily impressed by such things. That’s okay.

So the point of this rambling run-on-sentence of a post is… one more day in the office and then I can work from home again, and to celebrate I am going to see a fantastic live band that I’ve never seen before despite always really wanting to. It should be a good day. Wish me luck.

2026 50/90 Challenge Day 53/90

I was expecting that day 53 would be another day with no musical progress made at all. I ended up being wrong, but only just barely. Last night at about 10:00pm I was sitting up in bed with my iPad and I had an idea for a sort of drone-esque bass riff. I brought up GarageBand and failed miserably in my attempt to translate the idea into reality, but I did end up with a new song for the 50 songs in 90 days project. It’s just fake MIDI bass and fake MIDI drums with a fake MIDI guitar to act as a guide for when I record the real thing, but the full song structure was worked out. It exists even if it doesn’t really sound like what I was shooting for. That’s fine.

That’s it for day number 53. I filed the song idea as number 48… and there are still 37 days to go. I can’t believe how far along I am at this point. I won’t say I’m almost done (I have finished 37 songs and there is still a long way to go before I finish 50) but I’ve done a ton more than I usually do by day 53. I’m feeling pretty good about the state of things.

Betcha a dollar I just jinxed the whole project.

Dolly

I have never been a Dolly Parton fan. Musically, particularly. 9-to-5 was a good enough movie (back in the early days of cable TV it was on at least one of the movie channels at least 10 times a day every day for decades) so I guess I was okay with her as an actress. Country music makes my brain hurt though… a lot. I mean… a lot. I just hate it. It makes my skin crawl. It’s physically painful for me. So no, I was not a fan of her from a music perspective. Sorry.

I do recognize a total bad ass force of nature when I see one though and she was one. Not just a force but a positive force. Super heroes aren’t real, but she was and that was close enough.

Rest in peace, Dolly Parton. The grim reaper totally took the wrong 80 year old. 

In an attempt to make this even more about me, I never went to her theme park, Dollywood (which I believe is the number two theme park in the US behind Disney World? Is that right? I think it is), but I almost went once and I was really close to it another time. 

In my senior year of high school the music department was trying to plan a trip and the music director wanted to take us to Dollywood. He gave two reasons. First, while no one in Massachusetts in the late 80’s gave two shits about country music (we were the last market in the country without a country themed radio station and I was epically proud of that), it was one of only two really truly American forms of music. Our music director said the other was jazz, which is true to a point but I believe the correct answer is blues given that jazz and rock and roll and all of its derivatives evolved from blues. Whatever. The second reason was, obviously, that whole awesome-amuesment-park thing. We didn’t end up going. We went to Richmond, VA instead. There was a high school music competition/festival/thing there at the time and our concert and jazz bands played as well as all of our chorus groups. If I remember correctly, the jazz band (with a certain red head soloing on tenor saxophone) kicked some serious ass that week. Also, there was the Kings Dominon amusement park near Richmond and they had like three water flume rides and a stand up roller coaster with a full loop that kicked 30000 flavors of ass.

The time I was really close was earlier this year on The Great American Road Trip I took with my beloved wife. We were in the same town as Dollywood. I don’t think we ever got close enough to see any of it, but we were close enough to see a bunch of road signs telling us we were almost there.

2026 50/90 Challenge Day 52/90

Yesterday was a light day progress wise. I put rhythm guitars onto two songs. Songs number 46 and 47 to be exact. They both already had lyrics so they are now in the ready for vocals bucket.

37 songs complete, one ready to mix, six ready for vocals, and three ready for lyrics and melodies. That’s 47 songs in total… and still over a month to go. It is lucky that I am so far ahead of things right now because I am probably going to get shut out today (day 53). Its looking likely at least.

That Time of Year Again

It is a little on the early side for this, but tonight the annual binging of 9/11 documentaries has begun. Jen found a new one on Hulu and we’re watching it as I type this. It focuses on small groups of people who survived together being reunited 25 years later. It’s brutal but it is also heartwarming. That’s hard to wrap my head around, but it works so far.

Why do we do it every year? Honoring the memories of those who didn’t make it out? Honoring the trauma of those who did? We were 100s of miles away from all of the events that day so maybe we’re just thumbing our noses at the memories of how scared and helpless we felt. I don’t know. I don’t think I want to know, really. We do it every year and we’re not going to stop any time soon.

In other, unrelated, and much happier news, the U-Haul trailer that Bellana rented to move most of her stuff to California is packed and ready to be picked up to start its journey West. Bellana worked her ass off over the last few days go get everything ready. They are coming to get the thing tomorrow. She is at her dad’s tonight (it is his birthday) but she sent my wife a text asking if we could run to the store and pick up an Apple AirTag and put it into one of the boxes so that we can watch the trailer as it travels across the country. Ain’t living in the future fun?

Okay. I have a super long day in store for tomorrow and it is getting late so I am going to go to bed. Good night, everyone.

2026 50/90 Challenge Day 51/90

I was hoping to have a lot of time to work on music, specifically vocals, on day 51 but I was also pretty sure I would not have time for anything. Turns out I didn’t have time for much. No vocalizing for me yesterday.

I did add two new songs to the list. No real instruments yet, but all of the music has been worked out including the melodies and lyrics. They are songs 46 and 47. I also managed to mix one song. Yet another song with really crappy vocals. Hooray.

I’m not sure how the time is going to work out this week. I have three days in the office coming up and there will be one late night when I will check seeing a band off of my I-have-to-see-them-before-I-(or-they-or-we)-die bucket list. I’ll try to get short bursts of musical work in whenever I can.

Oh yeah, and spoiler alert for tomorrow…

Comics

The Disney+ Marvel page has a list of movies and TV shows that you should watch in preparation for Avengers Doomsday, which comes out… someday. A few months from now?

I started watching the list this weekend. It starts with the first two X-Men movies. I had seen them before (I saw the first one in the theater) but I didn’t really remember much about them. I was surprised by how… goofy? Is that the word? How goofy the fight choreography was. Like… CGI kung fu moves and stuff. I was not really prepared to see how much the MCU has upped the action movie game. Interesting.

Now it is Sunday night and I will be going to bed soon. Before that I am going to watch the new episode of Lanterns on HBOMax. Season one episode two. Will it be as good as episode one? I hope so, that one was pretty good.

2026 50/90 Challenge Day 50/90

Day 50 has come and gone. You know, as I typed that I had a thought… I sure hope I didn’t forget to update the title of the posts one time, thus throwing off the count of the days. I think yesterday was day 50 but I could be wrong via typo or something.

Yesterday was pretty good. I put rhythm guitars on three songs. They were the only guitar parts I had ready to go. After that it was all about lyrics and melodies. I banged out four songs worth. I tried starting a fifth but my brain sort of shut off at that point and I couldn’t come up with any more.

I’m hoping day 51 (today) will have some vocal tracking and maybe some lead guitars as well. We’ll see. There’s a lot going on today.