Category: Music

I Need to Play

I haven’t played my guitar this week and the stir crazy is getting to me. I’ve done a lot of work on 50/90 but none of it on guitar. I’ve got eight songs with vocals recorded that are just waiting for leads. I have three that are ready for rhythm guitar. Tonight. I hope. All totaled, I’m up to 47 songs now. Three more to go and then all I have to do is the gigantic mountain of work left to finish them up.

The Agents of Shield re-watch is up to season five episode one. It opens with a montage set to a Talking Heads song. At least I think it’s a Talking Heads song. It’s definitely David Byrne singing. It lead me to the question: The year is 2020, is it time for me to give Talking Heads a try? I more or less ignored them back in the 80’s. Should I change my mind? Change my tune, so to speak?

Jen and I have been trying to exercise. I’ve been getting 30 minutes or so in each day for the last few days. I’ve been slacking a little today though. One of the things the Apple Watch activity app tracks is calories burned. I had the goal set at 640. I can’t remember if I set that or if it defaulted that way, but it’s been like that forever.

My SleepWatch app has been giving me notifications stating that I get better sleep if I burn 800 calories. That’s interesting. The last few exercise filled days have seen me going way above 800 and I have been sleeping a little better than normal. I guess that settles it. My activity app has been upped from 640 to 800 calories. Yup. I need to go for a 5-6 minute walk now.

Car Music

I had six songs ready for vocals. This morning, while sitting in the movie theater parking lot, I cranked out four of them… poorly… as usual.

It was foggy out so it was a little harder to see people around me. I saw a couple of dog walkers and a jogger, but that was it. There was a tractor trailer parked near my usual spot so I went someplace new on the other side of the lot. A mall security car did a slowish drive by. I don’t think he was checking on me, I think he was just slow.

On an unrelated note, I have not had breakfast. The last food I ate was just before 9:00pm. I won’t eat anything until lunch at 1:00pm. I am officially trying this 16:8 fasting shit on for size. Also, I am really hungry. Four hours to go!

Not Today, Maybe Tomorrow

I fully intended to get up early today and do car vocals. I actually did get up early but… As I mentioned last night… that last song I worked on… the lyrics were so bad. It just took the umph out of the situation, you know? I need to rewrite.

So… fasting. What’s up with that? Give yourself an eight hour window each day where you can eat to your heart’s (stomach’s?) content, then the other 16 hours you don’t eat. In my 56 seconds worth of Google “research” it looks like most people set their eating window at 1pm-9pm. Outside of breakfast, that works okay for me. I want to cut down on between meal sowing. Something like this could gimmick me into cutting back some. Also, my 56 seconds showed me that zero calorie drinks (water, diet soda) are allowed during the fasting times.

I found an app I wanted to try to use to help. I thought you’d plug in times and it would tell you when to eat. It doesn’t. You turn it on when you’re fasting starts (9pm) and it tells you when it’s over. Okay… I guess I’ll start this fad tonight at 9pm. consider today’s breakfast my breakie swan song. What the hell, it’s quarantine. Let’s jump on this (a/any) stupid bus.

After my horrid performance trying to predict the winners of the second round of the NHL playoffs, I went into the third round with a tiny bit of optimism. Then on Sunday night the West series started and my pick lost game one. That’s okay, I guess. It’s just putting my pick into a statistical hole that is too big for the majority of teams to crawl out of but that’s okay, right? Ugh. I had this bad feeling that when the East series started up last night there would be another crushing loss. I checked the score just before bed. Would Tampa crush my heart again? Nope. They were up 7-2. I checked the final score today. They won 8-2. I feel a tiny bit better now.

Television. Season two of The Boys is out. I forgot that Amazon released shows weekly. Crap. At least they put out three on the first day. They are good so far, but now I have to wait for Friday for episode four. On top of that, Jen and I started watching Cobra Kai. We plowed through the first season. It is so much better than I thought it would be. I expected it to be goofy and silly and a bit of a farce. It was, sort of. Not a lot though. It was just good. Yeah we saw the series finale coming miles away, but it didn’t lessen the effect. I’m looking forward to season two, and season three is supposed to be on the way. I’m paused on The Watchmen for the moment, but I’ll get back to it. Same with Breaking Bad. Eventually I’ll get to Lovecraft Country too. For now though… I’m up to season four episode 15 of Agents of Shield. The rewatch continues.

For now though. Let’s have a good work day on this, the first work day after Labor Day. The first work day after the symbolic last day of Summer. Today is probably in my top three least favorite days of the year.

Ugh.

Day Off

Is everyone in the USA enjoying their Labor Day holiday?

My to do list today is clean the bathroom, change the litter box, and work on 50/90. Also, do some of that exercise shit. I went for a five minute walk already today, similar to what I was doing last week… just walking in place. By the end of the five minutes I could barely lift my feet off the floor. Being criminally out of shape sucks.

50/90 update. 31 songs done, 10 ready for lyrics, three ready for rhythm guitars, and one that’s just a bass riff. 45 songs total. I was hoping to be at 40 before August ended. I missed it by three. That makes September a little harder than I expected.

It’s been about an hour since my five minute walk…

I think I’ll do another one now.

Yikes.

A Little Guitar

I added some rhythm guitar to four songs today. It mostly went okay. There were a couple of moments when the tendinitis in my thumb decided to remind me it was there. I had to adjust a couple of things to resolve it, but it was really the first time that my hurt thumb was a factor, even though it was a very small factor.

Gear wise, I started out with what more or less is my Lizardfish setup. If there was a sound that I was forced to call “my sound” meaning my usual go-to it would be this. Gibson guitar into a Klon KTR into a Malaise Forever Black Lives Matter into a lowish wattage amp. In this case, two lowish wattage amps. Sometimes we’ll throw in either an MXR Uni-vibe or an MXR Phase 90 at the front of the pedal chain. Today I started out that way, complete with the Uni-vibe, but it just felt off. It could be that I haven’t played at all in a week or so, but I just wasn’t connecting. I ended up turning everything off except the Klon. Ahhh… there it is. The magic place.

Next thing I knew, I had blown through three more songs. Nice. Next time I might try zeroing the gain on the KTR and maxing the output and letting it push the two 15 watt amps into overdrive. That should be fine. It might be a touch louder than I usually get, but it should be fun.

Half Way Through

It took me half a day, but I am finally digging into the new Throwing Muses album. I’m only on track five but I had to post that it is utter bliss. Creepy, aggressive, Muses bliss.

This couldn’t be more different from the last album, Purgatory/Paradise, if it tried. Well, maybe they did try, I don’t know. If I had to compare it to previous stuff I’d say it’s spooky like House Tornado is at times, and heavy like the self titled first post-hiatus album was, but at the same time it is absolutely nothing like either of them. It’s just really good so far. Like, really good. Like I am so happy I could throw up all over myself with glee good.

I’m on track six now, “Upstairs Dan” and it’s my favorite cut so far. Either this one or Dark Blue, but I have been listening to Dark Blue so maybe I’m biased toward this.

Go listen to it! Go listen to it!

Classic Rock Throw Back Day

Today during my lunch break I was poking around on bookfayce and somehow ended up looking at some classic rock magazine site. There were a bunch of random articles that were about 10% of interesting, but I spent almost the whole hour there.

One article was the singer from 80’s hair metal band Warlock listing off the 10 albums that influenced her. Okay, I’ll bite. First on the list was Live In the Heart of the City by Whitesnake.

Now there’s a band that I probably should have liked back in the 80’s that I really did not like. Whitesnake more or less is David Coverdale, and he was the singer on one of my all time favorite albums. Burn by Deep Purple.

Coverdale made three albums with Purple between ’73 and ’75 (or was it ’74 and ’75, I used to know for sure but I’m old and senile now). Burn was the first one and it was amazing (apart from one song that’s just okay and one that is a complete dud. Everything else is outstanding, especially the title song). Stormbringer was the second. That’s the opposite of Burn. The title track is perfect and every other song on the album is about as interesting as listening to a toilet flush. The third album was Come Taste the Band and it’s divisive among Purple fans because it had Tommy Bolin on guitar instead of Ritchie Blackmore. I am not on the negative side of that fight. Tommy Bolin is a guitar hero of mine (so is Ritchie Blackmore) and I think the album is pretty good.

Now David Coverdale, in my humble opinion, is pretty good on those records. Not great, but good. There are times when Glen Hughes, the bass player and other singer at the time, shows him up but for the most part he’s fine. When you view them all as a whole you can see patterns emerge though, that were much clearer in Whitesnake during the 80’s.

David is a good singer, but he’s not the best lyricist. Yes, this is the pot calling the kettle black, and compared to me he’s freakin’ Shakespeare, but when compared to his lyric writing peers he does come up a little short. As a front man… well… it’s pretty clear that he saw Robert Plant when he was a kid and just decided to do that for a living. If Coverdale did something, it’s likely that Plant did it first.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not knocking the guy. He made Burn. He is in my personal rock music hall of fame. The guy gets an A+ for life in my book. It’s just… you know… compared to his immediate peers in both the mid to late 70’s and the hair spray 80’s… he comes up a little short, that’s all. Less so in the 80’s, I think, but… I mean… he did replace Ian Gillan who for my money is the best rock vocalist we’ve ever had… so even with a world class effort in Burn, he’s always going to be “the other guy.” I mean no offense, even though it seems like I am meaning offense. Seriously. Burn… you can do no wrong in my book after that, David. My hat is eternally tipped.

Anyway, I was talking about lyrics. Let’s just say that stylistically he is a little… repetitive. There are words and themes and such that he used A LOT on those three Purple albums that were still being hammered home in the mid-80s when Whitesnake broke in the US. He kinda seems to have a few binkies that he clings very tightly too, lyrically speaking.

So today I read that article where Doro Pesche… Peche… the singer from Warlock listed her favorite albums and that Whitesnake live album from 1980 or so was the first on the list.

Now we’ve made it clear that I love Deep Purple, and that I didn’t really love Whitesnake in the hair band phase in the 80’s. What about Whitesnake before then? I was always curious. Ian Paice and Jon Lord from Purple were also in the band for a while and those two guys are absolute giants in my book. Is it possible that 70’s Whitesnake would work for me in a way that Purple did and 80’s Whitesnake didn’t? I always wondered, but I never looked into it. They had a reputation for sleaze even before they sold any records to speak of in the US and my tolerance for sleaze rock is slim to none.

Now here we are in the quarantine wasteland that is 2020. Should I give ol’ David’s first post-Purple band a shot? Did Doro inspire me to do some digging in Apple Music?

Yes, yes she did.

While I was making dinner tonight I brought up that live album. I figured I’d play a little Mr Coverdale Bingo. I was assuming he’d use the phrase Rock and Roll in one of the first songs. Sure enough, it’s right there in the first chorus. I was a little more interested in another binky though. I asked myself, what’s the over under on the first time he says the word “gypsy?” Two songs? No, three. He’ll say it in the third song.

First song, second verse, first line. “It must be the gypsy in me.”

Oh, David.

I listened to about half of the record. It wasn’t bad. It was actually better than I thought it would be, though I wasn’t giving it the closest listen ever. It felt a little like Deep Purple Junior, which wasn’t too different from what I expected. One of the guitar players (David frequently gave the names of the soloists [thank you, David] and I may have missed them while prepping the quinoa, but I’m pretty sure there were two lead guitar players) was a little too fond of slide. The other guy was pretty good. Mostly though it just hammered home the undeniable fact that Ian Paice is pretty much untouchable on the drums, and Jon Lord is a god on the B3.

Anyway, that’s my very long and very pointless classic rock throw back story for today. Again, no offense to David Coverdale. Burn. Perfect. Enough said. I could listen to you sing “Might Just Take Your Life” or “Mistreated” all day long. Perfect. Coverdale and Hughes in harmony on “You Fool No One,” spot on. The two of them trading lines on “Lay Down, Stay Down” is basically a template for all rock bands with two voices that followed. “Sail Away”…. just 100% full on perfect.