Category: Music

Yes – The Quest, Partial Review

I’m listening to the new Yes record, The Quest. The first Yes record made without Chris Squire.

Track one is good. Everything else… sigh. It’s better than the last record, Heaven and Earth. That album was just boring. I couldn’t listen to it in one sitting. It was just lifeless dull nothing all the way through. (Oddly, that record is no longer on Apple Music or Spotify)

This one is better, but not by much. It opens well but steadily becomes more pointless as the cuts roll past. It’s just a wash of dull.

It’s not a total loss, which is nice, but it’s yet another collection that does nothing but gouge away at the band’s legacy. My advice is to just stop. Please, let it end mercifully. Just stop.

October 1st

At least in September you can pretend it’s still summer. The calendar says so for most of the month even though the air is getting colder and the plants are starting to die and it’s clearly not summer-like out there. If the calendar says it’s summer then you can still pretend it’s actually summer.

Not so in October. The fight is just over and we lost. Fall is here. Autumn. What the hell is so great about Fall that it gets two names? What a pompous ass. Oh well. New England winter is here. Let’s just get it over with. Only about eight months to go before New England spring finally arrives sometime in late May.

Wanna hear something funny? Last night I published a post that mentioned Jen is joining me on my Facebook crusade. Not long after that post went live she told me that she had just posted to Facebook. Hehe. Spartacus, I ain’t. It’s okay. She posted something really positive that even the vilest of nazi puke can’t touch. Also, who am I kidding. I said I’d try it for seven days. Come 2:00pm on Monday I am going to be posting pics of my guitars to 100 different guitar playing groups just like nothing ever happened. Because… well… in the grand scheme of things… nothing has happened. Nothing is happening. I’m just being a snooty nerd. Who you calling a pompous ass, you pompous ass?

Look at my cat.

I worked on another song last night. Another summer song to be redone. Now that it’s October I need to write something too. The Record Every Month Challenge is still a thing. Get to work, you pompous ass.

No, literally. Get to work. It’s 8:54am. Go punch in and be productive.

Happy Friday, everyone. Eight hours and 36 minutes until the weekend. The glorious first October weekend.

New Music Project?

I’ve been thinking about a new music project, but the idea is pretty lame and I am waffling back and forth on whether to do it or not.

It is unofficially called Quarantine Tunes Volume 50/90. The idea is to make some mostly minor changes to some of the better songs from the summer and work them into what passes for an album for me. In other words, slightly better sounding demoes that don’t involve any cutting and pasting.

I picked ten songs. Four of them are pretty decent, the others are okay I guess. Last night I listened through them all and took notes on what little changes I want to try. Today I started messing with the first of the ten. I used the same GarageBand file I used back in July but I replaced the drummer and the bass tracks with brand new takes. The bass part is free of all cut and paste. I will eventually redo every guitar and vocal track as well and then do a whole new mix.

The question that remains is this: How long is this idea going to hold my interest. I suspect not for long.

iPad Multitask

I just used the iPad’s multitask function for the first time. I was taking notes on songs I might want to re-record. Chrome was open on the left half of my screen, playing tracks from alonetone.com, while Trello was open on the right so I could add a comment to each song’s card.

It was so cool it literally changed my life.*

* #sarcasm

One Day Down

The Facebook bookfayce exile has lasted more than 24 hours. One day down, six(?) to go. I reached for the phone to check for notifications two or three times and just put it straight down. Nope. No bookfayce there.

I say six days to go, but do I mean it? As in… is it six days or one eternity? I haven’t thought that far ahead yet. I am classifying this as a temporary experiment, but if I feel okay at the end of a week I will just continue to stay away.

Forever though… can I do it forever? Probably not. When the band starts up again we are going to be communicating through Facebook messenger. At least we always have in the past and I don’t think I can Spartacus all four of us into a revolution. I think I am at least going to be using Messenger. After that, what about gigs? I am going to have to play the promotional game. Not that promoting the band on Facebook ever had any real results in the past. You just do it because it’s there, right?

All of this talk is making me want to get the band together. Nope. Not until (at the very least) my house has it’s booster shot. Even that is probably not enough to lighten the Covid-19 lockdown rules. We’ll have to see. We are taking it seriously here. Still. Very serious. Still.

Speaking of guitar… when the new Klon KTR circuits hit the stores, I am getting one. I just want to state that publicly. My Ryra The Klone pedal is awesome, but when the new KTR comes out I am going to replace it with the new redesigned KTR. You heard it here first, babie.

Feeling Lost

I feel so weird right now. I feel lost, somehow. At home, I had a huge music project that I was completely wrapped up in and now it’s done. At work I got flattened by a runaway train that is now back on the tracks.

Now what?

Those two things have kept the CPU in my head running at close to 100% capacity for most of the last month. Now that I’ve moved on from both things my CPU is down to a much more normal operating level and that is all kinds of good, but the rest of my brain is less occupied than it was and doesn’t know what to do with itself.

I had an idea to take the 10 least awful songs from the last three months and redo them in the hopes of improving them. I listened through everything and picked the songs I want to try, but I’m already losing interest.

What should I do? Part of me wants to just spend a few weeks watching TV, but I should do better than that, shouldn’t I?

I just don’t know what to do with myself.

I found a bag of Hershey’s Kisses in the junk food closet. I just ate a bunch of them and now I feel sick. I guess I ate too much. Somehow that is symbolic of my mental state. Blah, barf.

Done… more

I posted yesterday that the 50/90 shit was done. That was sort of true. I hit the 50 song goal and, as mentioned earlier, deleted my account. I’m done with that site. I wasn’t really done with the project though. I still had two songs to mix. I mixed them tonight. Now I’m finished, finished. If you catch my drift.

I made at least an attempt at 50/90 every year since 2013. I finished in 2014 with 50 songs. I didn’t finish again until Covid let me finish it in 2020 when I had 51 songs. Now this year I have finished for a third time with 52 songs. Setting the bar incrementally higher, or some nonsense.

Now it’s back to the Record Every Month thing from the RPM Challenge site. I haven’t been submitting songs over the last few months, but I have still been participating. I have at least one song written and recorded in it’s entirety for every month since March. I need to put together a playlist on Alonetone that acts as an official list, and then use a second playlist for all the extra stuff I did each month. Yeah, that’s a plan.

So we’re back at it on October 1st. See you then!

Booster

I am not yet quite qualified to get a Covid-19 vaccine booster shot. I have to wait a couple of weeks, I think.

I really want it. I really want it.

I want my band to get back together. The whole writing/recording demoes thing is starting to get old. I need to play loud with three friends who are playing along at a similarly loud volume.

I need a shave. I need to play live music. I need a booster shot. I need to delete Facebook. I just decided a few minutes ago that I am going to experiment with a full week away from the bookfayce. I am going to delete it from my iPhone and my iPad and close the tabs on my computers that I keep open. Hold on, give me a second… Okay, it’s off my phone and my iPad and it’s no longer open on this computer. Let’s give it seven days and see how disconnected and awful I feel. Conversely, I could say to give it seven days and see how less depressing life seems. Seven days without nazis. Well… I’m not deleting Twitter yet, so there are still nazis to piss me off.

When did this booster shot post turn into an anti-facebook post? I don’t know, but I still want the booster so… there’s that.

Okay, back to work.